Half a League Onward
by Loup de Mer
Summary: A familiar face rejoins the Normandy crew in order to investigate reports of mysterious attacks in the Terminus Systems. MShep/Jack, MShep/Ash
1. Casus Belli

It was supposed to be a relatively painless mission – in and out. Shoot some mercenaries, "confiscate" some cargo, then pat each other on the back and be back on the _Normandy_ in time for happy hour. It was nothing Garrus hadn't done a hundred times before, and with the number of missions in which he, Shepard, and Jack had been groundside together by that point, they could dispatch Eclipse like a well-oiled machine. But really, he wasn't all that surprised when their thoughtful planning started to fall apart. It was nothing against the Commander, of course. There was no one in the entire galaxy the turian respected more. He trusted Shepard with his life, and hell, he loved the human like he was family, but if he had learned anything from serving on the _Normandy_ – both of them, in fact – it was to never take anything for granted. He had gone into too many routine jobs only to end up in a firefight for his life, and wasn't about to let his guard down any time soon.

That damned mission was going to serve as another good reminder of why he couldn't.

First of all, the planet itself seemed to be working against them. It was incredibly hot and consisted of nothing but sand and a scattering of boulders as far as the eye could see. The moment he had set foot on the surface, the heat washed over him like he had just stepped into a convection oven, and suddenly all that he wanted to do was retreat back into the conditioned air of the shuttle just so that he could _breathe _for a little while longer. By the time they had made contact with their targets, Garrus was beginning to seriously wonder whether it was possible for the contents of his head to roast within his own plating.

Though the pointing-and-shooting areas of his brain seemed to be doing just fine, he decided smugly as another man fell with a tungsten slug in the head and he ducked back behind cover. The Eclipse responded with a bout of gunfire in his direction, and he cursed under his breath as crumbling bits of boulder came raining down on his fringe. He was going to have to move again soon.

He had thought the massive rocks were beautiful when he had first seen them. They were composed of some kind of sedimentary mineral, all layers of vibrant oranges and yellows worn smooth by the wind. In combat, however, they were proving rather useless as sources of cover. The mineral, while certainly aesthetically pleasing, was much too soft to withstand bullets, forcing him and his companions to shift position every time enemy fire reduced their temporary protection to a chunky pile of powder. Needless to say, those beautiful boulders were quickly beginning to lose their charm.

A rather gleeful exclamation of "Fly, bitch!" revived his good spirits somewhat, and he looked to his right just in time to see Jack hit the deck, her body still lit with a blue-black corona as the strangled cry of a floating merc rose up over the gunfire. The sound was quickly followed by another few bursts from a rifle that landed in the already crumbling shelter that was the biotic's latest boulder, until she had no choice but to scramble across open ground in search of another. She pushed herself backward, kicking up sand in the urgent effort to avoid the trail of bullets that followed quickly behind her until she had retreated her way practically into Garrus' lap.

At the moment of their collision, she jumped and jerked her head to look up at him as if noticing for the first time that he was there, her chest heaving at the effort it took to move around so much in such an intense climate. Her exposed skin was glistening with sweat, and as a result, sand was stubbornly glued to her forearms where she was supporting herself against the ground. Once content that she was again in relative safety, she took a long, aggravated breath. "Wanna do me a favor?"

"Name it."

"Ugly asshole. Two o'clock."

Garrus tentatively raised his head and leveled his sniper rifle to his eye, following her directions to an armor-clad human who was busy popping out the heat sink in his gun. He was crouched behind a metal crate, but they were at enough of an angle from each other for the master marksman to make a clean shot. As he felt the satisfying kick of his weapon, the man dropped, leaving a spray of dark red against the side of the shuttle behind him as evidence that the round had hit its mark.

"What ugly asshole?" His mandibles twitched in amusement as he looked down again to meet the grin she offered in reply.

The biotic had warmed to him some over the months that they had been working together. He supposed that his skills with a rifle, and possibly his willingness to pull her ass out of the fire when the need arose, had earned her respect. Or at the very least, had earned a reprieve from the contempt she had shown for the entire crew when she was still fresh off of the prison ship _Purgatory_. In turn, he had acknowledged that the passionate spark in her was truly something to be admired. They had reached a delicate sort of truce, as it were.

And it was a good thing too, he thought as he watched her spring back to her feet, the blast of her biotic shockwave scattering three more hostiles like bowling pins. Not a battle went by in which he wasn't reminded how happy he was that she was on _their_ side.

A flash of black and red in his peripheral vision assured him that the Commander was still alive and kicking on the other end of the battlefield; he had popped up briefly to correct matters when one of Jack's latest victims made the mistake of trying to get up.

"One less." The voice sounded tinny over the com-link, but otherwise held the same steady timbre that had guided him through countless battles before. No matter how desperate the situation, Shepard always managed to make everything seem effortless. The man sounded as if the showdown so far had barely made him work up a sweat – quite an impressive feat in the circumstances. He had never even acknowledged the sweltering heat since the drop in, despite being fully donned in his N7 armor, but then he had never been one to complain about things he couldn't control.

And the things that he could control – well, he controlled the hell out of them until they were nothing to complain about.

"Something isn't right here," the voice continued in his ear. "Why this much security for a cargo transfer?"

Garrus had been beginning to wonder the same thing as the fight dragged on. In fact, the whole operation was making him nervous. Their targets had come out of three different shuttles – two were clearly identified by black Eclipse insignias, but the third, larger transport vehicle was conspicuously void of distinguishing marks. Likewise, the targets themselves were a mixture of familiar yellow-clad troops and mystery combatants dressed out of uniform. Someone was going through trouble to hide the fact that they were dealing with mercenaries.

And, call him paranoid, but Garrus felt much more comfortable knowing who exactly he was stealing from.

He felled a LOKI mech, smiling briefly as he watched it shudder and spark in a twitching heap, and was lining up another shot when a flurry of movement at the edge of his scope captured his attention. He shifted his crosshairs to see what the dwindling resistance was up to and caught sight of a pair of hostiles high-tailing it out of one of the merc shuttles. He followed them to cover –quite a distance away from what had become the main battlefield, he noticed – then returned his sights to the doorway from which they appeared, just in time to see the reason for their sudden eagerness to give the vehicle a fair amount of space. His vision was dominated completely by white, blocky limbs.

The moment he realized what he was staring at, a fresh shot of adrenaline coursed through his system, quite effectively combating the fatigue that had been beginning to settle into his limbs. "Shepard, they've activated heavy mechs. Two of them."

"Son of a bitch," was the immediate reply, though by the low-pitched quality of his leader's voice, Garrus gathered that the outburst had not been meant for his ears. "Are you two as low on ammo as I am?"

The sniper glanced at Jack, her terse nod giving weight to his fears that the figurative tables were quickly beginning to turn on them. "I'm afraid so, Commander."

A grim silence settled over the channel. The sound of gunfire around them had all but disappeared, but the relentless mechanical whir of robotic limbs was slowly growing louder, the ticking of a time-bomb that would go off with a vengeance as soon as the lumbering hulks discovered their location. It was enough to drive a turian out of his head, but unyielding faith in his leader granted Garrus patience until new orders came, the inevitable moment when strategic battle planning gave way to the all too familiar blow-it-all-to-hell method.

"I think it's time to break out the Cain."

"Woah, hang on a minute," Jack spoke up, an unexpected occurrence as she was usually all for chaos and explosions. "Shepard, that thing is gonna take out everything in the area. If those crates blow, and it ends up that we came all the way down to this shit hole for nothing…" She trailed off with fists clenched at her sides, as if unable to think of a nasty enough threat with which to complete her sentence.

"Jack, I'm not gambling all of our lives for cargo," came the reply, seemingly untroubled by her unspoken promises of violence. "Let it go. We don't have time to argue about this."

Garrus could see the muscles in her jaw working beneath her skin as she ground her teeth together, getting the feeling that she wasn't talking to either of them when she spoke next. "No. We don't." She met his gaze then, only for a moment, but long enough to make him suspicious.

Rightly so, it turned out. Without another word, she ducked out from behind their shared boulder too quickly for him to even think about trying to stop her, leaving him momentarily stunned and quite literally in her dust. That was… definitely not part of the plan.

"Shepard!" He leaned out from cover to see the girl barreling straight for the two mechs. "Jack's gone. It looks like she's going to try to take them out herself."

There was a sigh of vexation, followed by another hissed curse tacked to the very end of it. "I'll take care of it. Be ready to fire on my signal."

"I'm on it, Commander," he assured, retiring his sniper rifle to the back of his hardsuit and replacing it with the relatively compact M-920 Cain. He didn't like to fire it, was a little on edge just holding it in his arms actually, and was grateful that circumstances didn't normally call for its use. Even after Mordin's assurances that "Nuke Launcher" was hardly an accurate nickname, he couldn't imagine that repeated exposure to anything that produced a mushroom cloud could be considered safe.

He returned his attention to Jack, who, funnily enough, was in danger of ending up _in_ the mushroom cloud if Shepard didn't reach her soon. She was halfway to the mechs, nearly within the blast range. Where was he? Garrus scanned the terrain, but felt blind while deprived of his scope.

One of the deadly giants seemed to have noticed her. Yes, it definitely had. It was rotating its top half to face her, aiming its mass accelerator cannon straight at her advancing form, and then… she was gone. Jack disappeared from his view when Shepard came out of nowhere, having flanked her in the cover of the boulders and delivered a running tackle with enough force to send them both rolling across the ground. The mech's bullets landed harmlessly in empty ground where the pair had been only a split second before.

"Garrus, now!"

He pulled the trigger without hesitation, though didn't stick around to watch the devastating effects. Instead, he hit the ground and brought his hands protectively up to his head, having seen before how far debris could fly after a blast so large. First came the sound, the rumble that boomed in his ears and shuddered beneath his feet. The wind was close behind it, relatively mild at his distance though he could hear distant boulders cracking closer to the impact zone, and soon sand was raining down on top of him and grinding between the joints of his armor unpleasantly.

After that: silence. Though just when he thought it was safe to uncover his head, something plummeted from the sky and landed mere feet from him with a crunch on the slightly yielding ground.

"_Defense systems off-off-offline_," stuttered the amputated mech head, sparking once before its optics went dark for good.

And once again, Shepard's steadfast voice rang in his ears.

"All clear."

* * *

The ride back to the ship was… tense, to say the least.

Not one of them had spoken a word since walking away from the flaming wreckage and scorched ground that the Cain had left in its wake. There was nothing to salvage, nothing to show for their long and tiring battle aside from bruises and sunburn. Garrus was taking it in stride. Or trying his best to, anyway. The mission had been a dud, but so had plenty of others, and he was sure that they would make up the losses sooner or later.

Though sooner would be much preferable, he decided as he glanced over at Shepard and took note of the grim expression on the man's face. They were in the middle of some financial issues, though that was about the extent of what he knew, and had no real idea of how dire their situation was. Cerberus had pulled their funding - understandable, seeing as they had completely obliterated a sizable investment along with that Collector base - and since then, they hadn't exactly been rolling in credits. Garrus understood that the Commander was under a lot of stress after extensive repairs to the _Normandy_ had eaten up almost all of their remaining money, and though stress was definitely not any kind of unfamiliar territory, he did his best to avoid giving his friend a hard time. The same could not be said for Jack.

She was lying on her back across an entire row of seats in the shuttle, one leg crossed over the other and fingers drumming restlessly on her bare stomach. Not once had her fixed glare wavered from the ceiling, but it was undeniably clear who the target of her nearly tangible animosity was. She seemed as though she was taking Shepard's rescue rather personally, as though pushing her out of the way of mechanical weaponry was synonymous with telling her to go wait in the Kodiak while the men took care of the heavy lifting.

It was going to end in a fight; that much was obvious. It was only a matter of time, and Garrus could only hope that he could at least get out of the shuttle before they were at each other's throats.

Shepard was the one to finally break through the heavy blanket of silence that had settled over them, apparently sensing the bomb that needed diffusing in the woman sprawled on the cushions across from him. He lifted his stare finally from the floor where it had been fixated for the better part of the ride so far, a weariness settling into his features in response to her apparent hostility.

His voice came out softly, though seemed stark as the only sound competing against the steady hum of the transport's engines. "Hey, Jack…"

"Don't '_hey, Jack_' me, you patronizing dick."

He bowed his head and sighed, any hopes of calm negotiations immediately dashed. When his eyes rose again to her recumbent form, they were stern and full of authority behind his visor. "I made a judgment call. You don't have to like it, but you ignore my orders like that again and we're going to have problems."

She whipped her head toward him to finally aim her scowl in his direction. "I _had _it, Shepard." Swinging her legs off the seat, she sat up to face him directly, her reclining position apparently one too passive in which to defend herself. "You knowI could've handled those mechs. Fuck, you've _seen_ me take out more than two before."

Garrus shifted his weight uncomfortably, scooting closer to the tinted window beside him in hopes that they might both forget he was there.

Yes, the Commander may have been an old pal of his and, yes, his relationship with Jack was as civil as it had ever been, but he still knew better than to try to break up one of their fights. The way they went at each other, one would think they'd been married for ten years as opposed to merely "shacked up" - as Jack referred to it – for a little over a month.

"Fresh out of cryo, you mean? When you weren't exhausted and dehydrated? Yeah, you handled them fine. But after that fight?" Shepard shook his head. "You're lucky you didn't fry your amp as it is."

"I know what I can handle." Her retort filtered out through clenched teeth. "We _needed_ that score. You know that and you still pussied out."

His eyes narrowed, the only physical sign of his growing annoyance. "I was looking out for _you_!"

"I don't need your goddamn protection!"

If Garrus pressed himself any closer to that window, he was going to need one of the engineers in the hangar deck to help him peel himself off by the time they landed.

Inconspicuously, he checked the time on his omnitool so that he might count the seconds until they were back on the _Normandy _more accurately, willing the time to go faster as the skirmish beside him raged on.

* * *

"I fucking _had_ it!"

Every head in the hangar turned to look as Jack came storming out of the Kodiak, her passionate anger echoing through the large open space and prompting more than a few nervous glances among the working crew. One more _second_ in that enclosed space with that stubborn jackass, and one or the other of them was going to have to die. Vakarian seemed to sense it too, practically scrambling out of the shuttle like the whole thing was about to burst into flame. Shepard was the only one who didn't look ready to curl up into a ball and hide until she decided to calm down. Well… him and Grunt, who seemed totally unfazed at the prospect of an incoming shit storm. But Blockhead didn't count. He had wandered over when he sensed the possibility of violence and was shifting his gaze back and forth between Jack and his battlemaster like he was watching a tennis match.

Shepard took his good old time stepping down from the shuttle, unfastening his helmet and tugging it off his head as soon as his feet were on solid ground. Beads of sweat were still clinging to his forehead from the oppressive heat of the planet's surface, and he wiped at them with the back of his arm before finally acknowledging her again.

"So you've said." He sounded tired. Definitely still angry - his tone was laced with a cold authority, a little something to let her know he wasn't going to let her just stand there and scream expletives at him for hours like she wanted to - but mostly, he looked and sounded like he wanted nothing more than to head up to his cabin and pass the fuck out. She supposed that it should have made her happy, that he was that much closer to admitting he was a shit-eating control freak just so that he could get rid of her, but she only felt a surge of frustration at the fact that he probably wasn't even going to satisfy her by fighting back. "You know what, Jack? If you have a problem with following my orders, maybe you should just stay on the ship next time."

Jack bristled, though it was mostly at the fact that the krogan was now going so far as to chime in with a grunt of approval at Shepard's threat. All _he_ cared about was having more chances to go groundside so he could stretch his legs and headbutt shit.

"I don't have to take this, Shepard. If you want me to keep following you into one death trap after another, maybe you should ease up a little on questioning my every single fucking move." She paused and sent a scowl over in Grunt's direction, waiting to see if he felt like interjecting any more unsolicited insight. He stayed silent, and in return, Jack swallowed the urge to see whether his weight was too much for her biotic throw to send clear across the room. "When are you going to trust that I know what I'm doing? I'm not a complete idiot - I can take care of myself."

His voice maddeningly calm, he answered without skipping a beat. "Can you?"

She felt the man's cool blue eyes sink to linger over her bare midriff, and knew immediately what they were focusing on. Spattered across her torso like small fireworks occasionally interrupting her tattoos, there were spots of scar tissue, still angry and red though they had been healing steadily since the incident in the Collector Base. Goosebumps sprang up immediately on her arms that had nothing to do with the temperature in the ship as she tried desperately to keep her mind from drifting back to the nightmare that put those scars where they were. Jack couldn't _believe_ he had the balls to throw that in her face.

But if he had been trying to knock the fight out of her, he succeeded. She crossed her arms over her chest, though looked more like she was cradling a turning stomach than exuding any kind of defiance, and tried to ignore the feeling that her skin was trying to crawl away.

"Fuck you." She met his already softening glare with a look of total disgust, and was in the midst of turning to walk away when he seemed to realize how big of an asshole he was.

"Jack…" He sounded apologetic enough, but he had crossed a line. The only reply she offered was a one-finger salute over her shoulder on the way out.

Shepard let out a long sigh, running a gloved hand over his head and tossing his helmet back into the shuttle with just a little more force than was probably necessary. Garrus looked on with some concern as his friend fumed, though was all-in-all much more at ease now that the "happy couple" was soon to be separated by at least one floor of reinforced metal. It had been like this for weeks now, starting not too long after the entire crew unexpectedly survived what they had previously been calling a suicide mission. Maybe Jack thought she could get away with more once she and Shepard were together, or maybe Shepard was trying to rein her in and Jack was feeling smothered. Hell, maybe the both of them were drowning in an affair that they thought was only going to last twelve hours before they were dead; Garrus just knew what he saw. And what he saw was that the unlikely pair's relationship was more… _explosive_ than usual, and it was all that everyone else could do to try to avoid the blast. "It's probably best to just let her cool off for a while. You know how hard it is to talk her down once you've set her off."

The turian's attention flickered momentarily to the deliberate stride of Grunt's departure – no doubt the war hound had only turned up to see whether the ever-escalating spats would finally come to blows – then shifted back to his leader as the man began the laborious task of removing his armor.

"It was a cheap shot, Garrus. She didn't deserve that." He sunk into silence after that, the flexible skin of his brow wrinkling into an expression of troubled thought. By the time he spoke again, he had already peeled the protective shell off of his body from the waist up, the black t-shirt underneath clinging to the sweat of his torso. Garrus noticed that even the dark fabric was dusted with sand from the brief periods of time in which Shepard had made the mistake of lifting the visor of his helmet, and he could only imagine how much of the abrasive dust he would find in his own suit when he finally got the time to settle down and get some much needed bathing done. "Maybe she's right. Maybe I've got her on too short of a leash."

"The leash is only there in the first place because you want to keep her safe." Not _entirely_ true. Garrus was fairly certain that said leash came into existence when Jack was first recruited mostly to ensure the survival of the Cerberus crew, but that point could be forgotten for the sake of their discussion. "You care about her. She has to appreciate that."

Shepard, however, seemed skeptical. He slid a covert glance over to the door through which the biotic had disappeared, only grunting noncommittally in reply before getting to work on the bottom half of his armor.

* * *

Jack made it into the elevator before she let herself lose any of the self-assured composure she was so careful to maintain around the rest of the crew. In the span of time it took to cross the threshold into the small space, however, she fell almost immediately to pieces. Her breath shook and came in irregular gulps of air. She broke out in a cold sweat and fought a momentary vertigo when she could have sworn the ground had shifted beneath her feet. Reflexively, she reached her hand out to steady herself against the wall and willed herself not to puke. She didn't want to leave any evidence of her temporary lapse into weakness.

God, it pissed her off.

She knew she wasn't the only one who was still having nightmares about the Collectors. There were plenty of crew on board who got the shakes anytime anyone mentioned them - especially those poor bastards who had been just seconds away from being melted down into organic sludge before the rescue team had arrived. But as far as she knew, she was the only one having debilitating panic attacks in elevators. She was supposed to be the strong one, the badass biotic who even now made her shipmates nervous when she walked into the room. Instead, she was a sniveling little bitch who couldn't handle the thought of a few stupid bugs. _Fuck_, did she hate bugs.

Determined to pull herself together before somebody decided to call the elevator, she tried to focus on steadying her breathing. But past experience had told her that will alone wasn't enough to force down the furious butterflies inside of her. What had helped her before?

Gunning shit down was always therapeutic, but that buzz had already been killed thanks to Commander Hardass. Screwing said hardass hadn't seemed to hurt either, but that was hardly an option at the moment. Just the thought of him was enough to incite a gratifying flare of anger. It was _his_ fault she was like this. If he hadn't brought it up-

She leaned back against the cool, metallic wall with a sigh and shoved any vengeful thoughts of him out of her mind completely. Shepard didn't know the extent of her trauma. And he wasn't ever going to either - not if he was just going to use it as ammunition to take her down a few pegs whenever he thought she was getting out of line. She led her head thud back against the smooth surface behind her, then did it again with more force when the first impact wasn't loud or painful enough to be satisfying.

"Jack, you appear to be agitated." The placid, emotionless voice of EDI filled the room, making her jump though she probably should have been used to the sudden appearances of the AI's disembodied voice by that time. "Should I call for Doctor Chakwas?"

Shit, was there no privacy anywhere on the goddamn ship? "Shut up, shut up, shut up..." She pressed the palms of her hands against her closed eyelids, repeating the words to herself like a mantra even after the ship had long gone silent again. Something about the darkness was soothing, and in the quiet that followed EDI's surprising compliance, Jack slowly began to breathe steady again.

The slowing pulse of her heartbeat in her ears had nearly disappeared completely by the time she heard the distinctive thudding footsteps of over two thousand pounds of lizard coming to stand beside her in the elevator.

She said nothing at first, didn't even move in hopes that Grunt might take the hint and leave her alone. Or better yet, that he was a figment of her paranoid imagination, and when she opened her eyes she would be, miraculously, still alone.

"I don't know what you're so upset about. At least _you_ got to see something blow up today."

Fucking hell.

Jack let her hands drop from her eyes and rolled her head to aim a withering look in his direction. Usually it was enough to chase off any unwanted guests who wandered too close to her in the mess hall, but Grunt was, as usual, immune to her attempt at intimidation. He only regarded her passively, his slitted and weirdly blue eyes eventually shifting from her to the yet unlit buttons of the elevator. "Is there a reason we're not going anywhere?"

"Is there a reason everyone's panties are in a wad today?" She snapped back, jabbing her thumb violently into the button for the crew deck then crossing her arms defensively. "_Jesus_."

"You kidding? Shepard hasn't let me kill anything in _weeks _-"

"Rhetorical question, Grunt."

As irritable as she was that anyone had decided to stroll into the elevator at that moment, she supposed that she could count herself lucky that it had been him. The very last thing she wanted was sympathy, and you never had to worry about getting any of that from a krogan. He wasn't about to ask her if she was okay, or why her face appeared to be drained of all color. He would probably think it was hilarious that she was quaking in her boots over some phantom enemy they had already stomped into submission, and he would have told her to suck it up and deal with it.

As a matter of fact, that was exactly what she planned on doing.

The rest of the ride passed in silence, neither one of them being particularly chatty on the best of days, and when they arrived at their destination, Jack stepped out onto the deck without another word.

She headed first for the mess, hoping to smuggle out a few ration packs to avoid dining with the rest of the crew later, but the sight of Shepard and Garrus heading toward Lawson's office quickly killed her appetite. Promptly backpedaling to avoid catching their attention, she changed direction and tried to think of anywhere she could go to get some peace and quiet. Starboard observation, maybe? It was usually empty since they had dropped Samara off to continue her ruthless brand of justice in asari space. It would do. At least no one would know to look for her there.

Jack was nearly halfway to her newly-decided destination before she noticed the sound behind her, the steady _thud_, _thud_ that made her grind her teeth and curse inwardly in disbelief when she realized what it was. Again?

She stopped and looked back over her shoulder at the persistent krogan, now stopped as well and watching her expectantly as if waiting to see whether she would make any more sharp turns. Grunt had started this shit months ago, after their trip to Tuchanka had made him officially Urdnot. No explanation, just started following her around the ship like a lost puppy. He never did it to anyone else - well, except Shepard when he happened to be in the midst of choosing who to take groundside with him. But she couldn't fathom what drew Grunt to her, of all people. She sure as hell hadn't encouraged him. Maybe it had something to do with her going on that big Rite of Passage field trip when they killed the thresher maw. Or maybe she was the only one who could hear about the more graphically violent of his battle imprints without turning green. Regardless, she hadn't figured out a way to get rid of him, so she resigned herself to having company for the time being.

Letting out an exasperated puff of air, she continued walking. As expected, the _thud_, _thud_, _thud_ stayed close behind her.

"You ever heard of a cat?"

A momentary silence followed her question. No doubt Grunt was confused about her sudden willingness to start a conversation. Usually her reaction to his shadowing ranged from irate silence to flat-out yelling for Shepard to call off his pet. She didn't look back again, but she could imagine him checking over his shoulder to verify that she was, in fact, talking to him. The thought almost made her smile. Almost.

"No," finally came the rumbling reply.

"They're from Earth," she continued, as if there had been no pause. "Little, furry. Some humans keep them as pets. A guy I knew even brought one onto his ship to keep him company." She scoffed at the memory. "He probably saw it once every couple of weeks. You know what the little asshole did?" She didn't wait for a response. "Picked out the one engineer who _hated_ cats and just refused to leave the guy alone. A whole ship full of people willing to give it attention, and it latches onto the one person who can't stand having it around."

Here she paused again, twisting at the waist in order to send a significant look back at him, one sleek eyebrow raised. Jack took him to be a little slow, so gave him plenty of time for the implied connection to sink in before adding, "Dumb cat, huh?"

Grunt shrugged. "Sounds like a useless animal. Your friend should've just eaten it."

Her face fell, and along with it went all hope of him grasping her point. Too subtle for him, apparently. Funny. She wasn't used to erring on the side of subtle.

"Wish I would've thought of that," she muttered dryly, closing the rest of the distance to the observation deck. She gave up on getting rid of him. She just didn't have the energy for it.

Whatever. Maybe the two of them could start a Shepard Sucks club or something.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** This is my first attempt at writing something of any considerable length, so here's hoping I can actually stick with it to the end. And also not butcher Jack's personality in the process. Amen.

Comments, suggestions, criticism, bribes, insults - all welcome.


	2. Gimme Shelter

_- Three days later -_

Operations Chief Williams winced as her boot crunched down on broken glass, the sound magnifying in the pervasive quiet and no doubt giving away her position to all kinds of creepy crawlies she imagined waiting and lurking in the shadowy corners around her. She lifted her foot again and carefully attempted to navigate around the shattered remnants of window on the floor, reluctant to let her concentration waver from her surroundings for any length of time while something could still leap out of the darkness to attack her.

The building was on emergency power, casting everything in an eerie red glow that was certainly not helping the young marine's rather overactive imagination. Her brain was skipping around to all kinds of dumb things to be dwelling on when she had to keep her head on straight, nightmarish creatures that she had seen with her own two eyes and hoped to God she never had to see again. Every phantom movement she caught out of the corner of her eye was in her mind a thorian creeper, a husk, a rachni.

Rachni. She shuddered involuntarily and tried not to think about where in the galaxy that massive queen might have scuttled off to. It was probably smart enough to keep a good distance away from any human colonies for a while, though. Right?

Williams steeled herself, narrowing her eyes as she stared down the length of her rifle, and shoved those unhelpful thoughts out of her head. _Stop psyching yourself out, Ash._

She weaved cautiously through a maze of overturned chairs and splintered tables, over dishes and silverware that had been scattered during an interrupted meal, past some dark substance splattered on the wall that she wasn't sure she even wanted to identify. All the while, nothing shuffled out of the darkness to grab her, no tap-tapping of oversized insect legs or chilling groans from mindless husks. The place was completely deserted. No monsters, no people – dead or otherwise.

When she reached the far wall of the room without incident, a small fraction of the muscles in her tense body relaxed and she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding in. She cocked her head and felt a satisfying pop in her neck as she spoke out loud into her helmet's com-link. "Clear."

"Same here, Chief." Private Caldwell's voice broke through the sinister atmosphere and soothed a couple more of her high-strung nerves. Something about that place was really getting to her.

"No colonists?"

"Not a one. But if you've got a moment, Ma'am, I think you might want to come take a look at this."

Williams cast another glance around the room, silently deciding that he could be calling her over to see a grilled cheese sandwich shaped like the Pope and she still would have been grateful for the excuse not to hang around there by herself any longer. "On my way."

It was reassuring to be in daylight again, to see the rest of her team prowling in and out of the other colony structures and remind herself that she had not slipped into an old sci-fi horror flick. The whole situation was reminding her way too much of Horizon. In fact, that was probably why she was sent in the first place, to verify that the supposedly neutralized Collector threat wasn't about to rear its ugly head again. Though the more she saw, the more convinced she was that this had nothing to do with the Collectors. When _they_ moved in to harvest a colony, nobody saw them coming; all that she had witnessed so far suggested that these mystery antagonists had all the stealth and subtlety of a herd of stampeding rhinos.

Caldwell was waiting in the building adjacent to hers, so the break from her uncharacteristic claustrophobia was little more than a tease before she was plunging back into the darkness again. This building was smaller than the one she had explored, some kind of storage unit, and so she came upon the other marine almost immediately.

She didn't have to ask what he wanted her to see.

There was sunlight streaming through a large hole in one wall of the room. The metal wall. Artillery fire, maybe? No. The edges of it were jagged, bent and torn in all directions as if something had tried to claw its way in from outside. Except that was ridiculous – what the hell claws through a metal wall? It was easily wide enough for her to crawl through, if she were ever struck with the urge. The tricky part would have been reaching the other side without gutting herself in the process. Shrapnel-like fragments jutted cruelly from all sides like gnarled teeth.

"What d'you think did this, Chief?"

Williams dragged her eyes away from the spectacle to glance at the man beside her. His eyes were wide, flighty; he looked like he wanted to high-tail it out of that place just as much as she did. "I don't know."

"Not Collectors, then?"

She shook her head. "Doubt it. The Collectors never left evidence of a struggle before."

The private "hmm"ed in understanding, then let out a noise of amusement that sounded more like a cough in his tightly-wound state. "You can't spit around here without it landing on evidence of a struggle."

Though she didn't find that fact particularly funny, she indulged him with a smile in hopes that it would take the edge off of his unease. He returned it briefly, their helmets only allowing the gesture to shine through in their eyes, before they were both settling back into their grim expressions.

Unable to help herself, she ran her fingers gingerly over the tortured surface, careful to avoid the sharp rim even with her thickly-gloved hands. There was a dried liquid coating the bottom fringe that couldn't have been anything but blood. There were drips of it running all the way down the two or three feet it took to reach the floor. Red – so that ruled out quite a few non-human species from the suspect list. Williams decided it must have come from a colonist, because to admit that it might have come from whatever had been playing can-opener on that warehouse was to acknowledge the possibility of a living creature being able to cause that kind of destruction. A living creature that could clear out an entire colony and disappear without a trace. She just did not want to start going down that road.

And for about the millionth time since her life on the _Normandy_ had been violently torn out from under her, she wished that Shepard was still around to watch her back.

* * *

"_Everyone through the doors! Now!"_

_One Collector after another fell at Shepard's feet, oozing dark blood out of holes punched in their carapaces by his assault rifle. And still, they kept coming. He could recall the smell with surprising accuracy, the bitter, earthy aroma that grew stronger with every rasping flutter of an approaching wingbeat until it made him want to gag. All around them, the air was humming ominously, and the high ceiling of the room was hardly visible through the swarm of seekers that buzzed violently just outside of the translucent blue of Samara's biotic field, currently the only thing preventing the lot of the insects from descending upon them all._

_And Samara couldn't keep it up forever._

"_Hurry, Shepard," the Justicar pleaded breathlessly, lasting barely another step before stumbling and falling to her hands and knees in utter exhaustion. Casting one last nervous glance up at the living cloud above them, Shepard left the cover fire to Jack and Thane and kneeled at Samara's side, drawing one of her arms over his shoulders to provide support as he helped her the rest of the way through the towering archway that led into the next room. He barely registered in all the chaos that Thane was the only one to slip past him to safety, could only track the _pop_, _pop_, _pop_ of his rifle to know that he was close by. _

_The asari was settled onto the floor by the time he realized the persistent, deafening bang of Jack's hand cannon was still a substantial distance behind him._

_Damn it, why did she always have to be the last one to retreat? _

_He drew his weapon again to go help her - or to drag her away from the fight, whichever the situation called for – but the sight that greeted him when he turned around made his blood go suddenly cold._

_She hardly needed him for the Collectors. She was taking them out one-by-one with deadly accuracy, every shot bursting through chitin and sending her targets to the ground. Hard. _

_But the swarm had noticed that the field was gone, and it was falling fast toward her. Jack didn't see, was too concentrated on the bugs in front of her to look up. She was backing toward the doors, but slowly. Too slowly._

_She wasn't going to make it._

"_No! Fall back!" Shepard was already running as he shouted, shots from the remaining Collectors whizzing past him and crackling against his shields. He reached her almost exactly when the swarm did, to the point where he was forced to thrust his arm into the vibrating mass just to encircle her waist. She stumbled at the strength of his tug as he pulled her back to safety, landing them both in a heap on the ground while the enormous doors slammed shut at their feet and crushed the front lines of the pursuing insects between them._

_When Jack first let out an anguished yell, he thought that she might have been shot. That thought passed soon enough, though, when she squirmed and rolled away from him, brushing furiously at her torso. There were maybe half a dozen of them on her, seekers that had managed to hold on to their target even as she had been dragged away from the swarm. The more she struggled against them, the more desperately they clung to her, dug into her in an attempt to escape from her grasping hands and panicked bursts of biotics. _

_Revulsion paralyzed Shepard momentarily before he dropped his gun and sprang to her side. He pried the first one off, the relentless insect leaving a starburst-shaped lesion on her abdominals in its wake. It had time to struggle for only a second, its needle-like legs waving helplessly in space, before he crunched it within his fist, quickly reducing it to a rather unappetizing mess of goo and cybernetics. _

_Between the two of them, they managed to remove most of seekers before too much damage could be done. But each one came off fighting, scrambling, tearing, and soon Jack was oozing blood from wounds scattered all over her front. The beetle-like shells were becoming more and more difficult for Shepard to get a hold of as his gloves became slick with blood. _

_She was tough, though, and almost all of them were off of her. Almost all of them were gone, and she was going to be okay. No one was going to die, damn it. Was that all of them?_

_No - there was one more. He caught a glimpse of its back end right before it disappeared beneath her skin. _

_A horrified shudder ran through him, and he only absently felt the impact of Jack's fist slamming down on his knee as she let out a pain-induced growl. His mind froze, but his hand went automatically to the field knife at his waist as if exhibiting instincts of its own._

_He drew the blade from its sheath, the metallic sheen glinting even in the dim light, then met her agonized eyes as if asking her permission to use it._

_Except no, he wasn't asking for permission; he was asking if she was ready. He was going to cut that little fucker out of her and then tear it limb from limb._

_Her face was pale, her teeth gritted together so tight they might have all cracked right up the middle. Her knuckles were white against his knee, but she still kept her eyes steadily on him, perhaps in an effort to keep them away from her own torso. "Do it!" _

_Shepard shifted his attention back to the slowly migrating lump on her belly, ignoring his own turning stomach in unwavering concentration. He had one chance. An unsuccessful cut might have driven the insect deeper inside of her, for all he knew. _

But that isn't going to happen_, he assured himself, his hand steady as he finally drove his knife into soft skin._

_Her resulting scream echoed all the way through those cavernous halls. _

And even weeks later, it was still ringing in his ears.

Shepard was seated at his desk in the captain's quarters, staring absently at the report on his computer that he had honestly given up on reading a good ten minutes ago. The familiar voice of Mick Jagger was drifting over from his sound system only to flow into one of his ears and out the other. Instead of allowing him to remain in the comfort of his room, his brain had insisted on playing back _that_ lovely memory for perhaps the hundredth time, evidently intent on driving him completely out of his head with it.

Jack hadn't spoken to him in days - that was certainly the main root of the problem. She was apparently avoiding the places he would usually expect to find her. He had made the trek down to the lower level of engineering several times and continuously found it empty. He never managed to catch her in the mess hall, and she wouldn't show up on the CIC. Every time he set foot into a room with her, she seemed to disappear before he could pin her down. It was like she was performing some kind of vastly unamusing magic trick. He might have been impressed with her ability to avoid him while they were stuck out in the ass-end of space together, if he weren't so endlessly frustrated that she could manage it. If her plan was to make him feel guilty enough to start groveling, well…

His eyes shifted traitorously to the call button sitting mere inches away from his right hand.

Goddammit, it was working.

* * *

Jack might have surprised _herself_ just as much as she did Shepard when she actually paid any attention to the ship-wide request for her to come see him in his quarters. Yeah, she had been avoiding him. And the guy had a lot of nerve trying to call her out before she was good and ready to play nice with him again. For weeks, he had been holding her back, leaving her out of missions, siccing the doc on her every time she so much as strained a muscle. Bottom line, she was sick of all the coddling shit and she was determined to get a break from it even if she had to sneak around the ship for a while.

But she supposed the few days of relief that she got would have to do, she decided as she stood outside the door to the captain's quarters. Jack wasn't _completely_ without mercy. By then, the boss man was probably tearing at that tidy military hair of his over what he was no doubt considering to be some kind of punishment for him - because if the entire fucking universe wasn't revolving around him every second of the day, it might implode.

Though that wasn't to say she _hadn't_ been trying to punish him.

The door before her slid open only a moment after she knocked, and Shepard greeted her with a slightly raised eyebrow and a hesitant smile. She must have looked just about as happy to be there as she felt.

"I wasn't sure if you'd show up," he admitted.

"Yeah, well…" She grumbled as she slipped past him into the room, "You sounded too pathetic to ignore."

"That's what all the ladies tell me," Shepard smirked in response.

Jack scoffed, but turned toward the soft glow of the fish tank in an effort to hide her guarded frown, pretending to be interested in the few surviving skald fish still swimming about; he wasn't nearly as dejected as she had expected to find him. "You're gonna have to be a lot more self-deprecating than that to get back on my good side."

"Well then, _Sour Patch_," He gathered the courage to sidle up behind the woman and plant his hands against the glass on either side of her. He couldn't muster quite enough to try to touch her, though. "Does that mean you're not gonna admit you're here because you missed me?"

She snorted at his choice of nickname, the ghost of a smile flickering over her lips before she smothered it beneath a scowl. "Cut it out."

"Cut what out?"

"Don't play dumb with me, Shepard. I know what you're doing." Jack turned in place to face him straight on, cursing an inconvenient little flutter in her stomach as she realized just how close he was. She wanted to back up against the tank, at least until she couldn't feel his breath on her face anymore, but she sure as hell wasn't going to let him know that he was getting to her. Even without laying a finger on her, he could still manage to make her weak in the knees. Damn it.

All the same, she remained defiantly nose-to-nose with him, implementing a much-practiced mask of indifference. "You try to act all cute so I'll forget how much I hate your stupid guts. You've pulled it on me before."

An infuriating little grin appeared on his face. "You think I'm cute?"

Her lips twisted into a smirk in response. "I said _try_."

With that, she swatted one of his arms out of her way so that she could proceed down the steps into the cabin proper, waiting for him to follow before she addressed him again. She had come prepared to fight him at every turn, he suspected, taking her folded arms and rather defensive stance as a bad sign.

"You called me up here 'cause you wanted to talk, didn't you?" In a fluid motion, she hopped onto the arm of the sofa, perching there with one boot digging into the Cerberus-funded leather. "So talk."

Shepard met her hard gaze for a moment without speaking, honestly content with watching the light of the tank shine down onto her face, the occasional shadow of a fish fluttering across her striking features. He couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when he had managed to see past the crude and violent disposition, the shaved head, and the full body suit of tattoos that she hid behind. Maybe it had happened gradually. The girl had gone through so much trouble trying to scare him off, but in the end, it had all been wasted effort; he still found her disarmingly beautiful. Even while she was trying to stare him down.

And, damn, was she good at it. He averted his eyes with a sigh when she gave no sign of any willingness to let him off the hook, a submissive gesture she seemed to appreciate as the side of her mouth once again quirked upwards. He didn't actually enjoy these uncomfortable heart-to-hearts any more than she did, and had been trying to get away with making peace without one. It was quickly becoming clear, however, that the two of them couldn't carry on like they had been for much longer. He couldn't just ignore the growing tension between them anymore.

He switched off the music that had still been faintly playing on his way to join her on the couch, an action he soon regretted as the sudden silence cast a rather somber atmosphere over their prospective chat. Shifting his weight as he settled onto the cushion nearest to her, he wet his lips and turned his head toward her expectant stare. "I wanted to apologize."

"Oh yeah?" Jack's eyebrows lifted subtly, and to her credit, she kept her sarcastic tones to a minimum. "For not trusting me with those mechs? Or maybe for when we went to take out those Blood Pack mercs and you left me to guard the shuttle?" She paused briefly, then snapped her fingers as if suddenly sure that her next guess was the right answer. "How about that time I told you my amp was bugging me and you wouldn't let me off the ship for a week?"

"For all of that," he replied sincerely, and quickly - before she could come up with anything else to be angry about. "But mostly for the lack of explanation for it."

"I've got a feeling I know exactly what the explanation is." She twisted in her seat to face him, otherwise unable to properly glare at him while they were sitting side by side. He furrowed his brow in response to the hostility, though didn't flinch beneath it.

"That so?"

"I get it, Shepard. The resident psycho has a freak-out in the middle of Bug Village, so now you've gotta stick the training wheels back on. You don't think I can handle it anymore."

"Oh come on, Jack. That's not-"

She cut him off with a shake of her head. "All the time I've been on this ship, I've _never_ given you a reason to doubt me. Not one fucking reason. Now you're watching me closer than you did when I was just a convict you broke out of _Purgatory_."

"I _don't_ doubt you," he insisted. "I'd trust you with my life. I _have _trusted you with my life."

"So what, then? What's the problem? You give all the dangerous shit to your turian boyfriend now – why won't you let me in on the good jobs anymore?"

All the time they had been talking, he had been trying to stay calm. The last thing he wanted to do, after all, was sink into just another shouting match. But right then he couldn't stop himself from raising his voice. "Because I worry about you! Alright?"

Shepard's outburst struck the woman temporarily silent. In the pause, he bowed his head and sighed wearily, his voice softening considerably when he spoke again.

"I love you, Jack." He spoke as if it were obvious, as if she would be blind not to know it already, though it was only immediately after he made the statement that _he_ realized it was true. He loved the tattooed little firecracker, crippling baggage and all. _Loved_ her. Well, shit.

Her reaction was excessively hard to read, though her eyes were suddenly locked squarely onto his. Her lips parted momentarily as if she were going to speak, but then quickly snapped closed again. Shepard smiled a little, imagining all of her many defense mechanisms coming online at once only to short each other out.

"Bullshit," she replied at last. Not exactly the response he was expecting, but for all the harshness of the word itself, her voice came out soft and unsure. In that moment, he recognized what he was seeing behind those deep brown eyes, through the gaze that was furiously searching him for some sign of insincerity: Fear.

Shepard's smile disappeared as quickly as it had come. He had forgotten how uncomfortable these things made her. It was almost funny that for all the things she was willing to do physically, all it took was a little genuine affection to render her socially crippled. He reached a hand up to brush his fingers across her cheek, and after a moment, her eyes fluttered shut. After another, she was actually leaning into his touch.

"Shepard, I -" She trailed off, any words she might have had catching in her throat and refusing to come out. In the pause, she met his gaze again, eyes full of frustration at her own inability to say anything coherent. So instead, she fell back on what she knew. Slipping off of her perch on the arm, she crawled into his lap, pushing him roughly against the back of the couch and kissing him with an urgency that set him on fire. He pulled her close against his chest, savoring the feeling of her full lips against his and silently deciding he would never go so long without it again.

Jack plucked his hands from where they had settled on her hips and guided them up to the zipper of her skintight vest. He felt for the small metal grip and pulled it slowly downward, taking pleasure in the impatient tenseness of her body. She tolerated the agonizing pace for a few seconds before she nipped sharply on his lower lip in an attempt to hurry him up.

Shepard hissed through his teeth and flipped her over onto her back as punishment. She put up the predicted struggle against allowing him dominance, but he was ready for it, quickly catching both of her wrists and pressing her into the couch with his weight. Once she was securely pinned, he took a moment to stare down at her, her dark eyes flashing and her lips flushed pink. He grinned.

"You let your guard down." He brushed a kiss against her forehead. "You're losing your touch."

She let out a quiet noise of vexation, but was distracted by the attention he began lavishing on her neck before she could put up too much of a fuss. He risked letting her hands free to feel for the zipper of her top again, and she arched her back to help him reach it. Shepard made short work of it with one last tug. When the fastening was finally undone, she sighed lightly against his ear and he felt himself shiver. He pushed himself up enough to peel the garment away from her and drop it carelessly to the ground, taking the opportunity to drink in the sight of her bare torso. After a moment, he leaned down again, pressing his lips to her stomach just above the dip of her belly button.

As soon as his attention was away from her face, Jack smiled. A _real_ smile. The same kind that had snuck up on her the night before they had gone through the Omega 4. A smile of contentment.

She then threw her weight to push him over and regain the upper hand while he was distracted, sending them both off the edge of the sofa cushions. Jack smugly on top again, they hit the floor with a heavy thud that shattered into rare breathless laughter from both of them before they became too engrossed in each other to mind much where they were anyway.

* * *

Morning found Shepard back at his desk, bathed in the light of his computer screen as he sifted through the reports and the messages that Jack had so capably distracted him from the night before. It was early, and the room was still dark to allow the woman to sleep; in his experience, waking her before she decided herself that she was ready to be awake was typically a bad idea.

He rarely slept through a whole night ever since he had been brought back from the dead. Sometimes sleep stalked him for days before he could actually indulge in a restful night. There was just too much weighing down on him – the approaching showdown with the Reapers, the ever-present feeling that Cerberus was lurking in the shadows just out of sight - and all that paired with the fact that he and his crew were basically on their own in the middle of it all. Lately, he was actually beginning to regret telling the Council to shove their superficial offer of a renewed Spectre status up their collective ass.

And then there was the newest development.

Shepard looked past his screen at the lumpy form under the sheets of his bed, smiling briefly despite the worries gnawing at the back of his mind. For all the affection Jack stirred in him, though, there was also a twinge of guilt that came along with it. Focusing his attention back onto his computer, he ignored the remaining unread messages and searched way back through the archives to dig up the one email that had been quietly nagging at him since he had woken up that morning. After scrolling past pages of spam, old messages from the Illusive Man, and threats from the Urdnot shaman about keeping Grunt in one piece, he came upon what he was looking for – a subject line titled "Hey there."

He had read the email about a thousand times already, but had only thought about replying to it once or twice. At that point, however, he felt like he had to. It was only fair to let Ashley know that he was with someone else, especially since he had dropped the l-word the night before. But how the hell was he supposed to tell her?

More for the purpose of stalling than anything else, he read the whole thing one more time. One line seemed to stick with him though, drawing his eyes back over it again and again until he finally bowed his head and rubbed his hands over his face in an attempt to erase it from his vision.

"_Just stay alive out there… Skipper. I don't know what the future holds, but I can't lose you a second time."_

_Fuck… I'm sorry, Ash._

Shepard sat for what seemed like a long time, trying to compose a suitable message in his head as his hand hovered over the "reply" button. In all probability, he might have been there half the day without actually typing a thing if he hadn't heard stirring on the other side of the room. At the first rustle of bed sheets, he closed out of his email entirely. It could wait until later. He pulled up a report and began reading that instead, probably making more progress in the few moments it took for Jack to trudge from the bed and up the stairs from the living area than he had all morning.

She was still groggy from sleep, still naked except for a pair of his boxers that she had pulled on in a surprising act of modesty. He tried not to let the still plentiful bare skin distract him from pretending to be absorbed in his paperwork.

She yawned and stretched her arms above her head as she padded barefoot across the floor toward the bathroom. "I'm using your shower."

Shepard made a quiet noise of acknowledgement, his eyes not wavering from the computer screen again. He heard the door swish open behind him, but the footsteps paused. There was a beat of silence before Jack spoke once more.

"Care to join me?"

His reading stopped immediately. The threat of a smile already hovering around his mouth, he swiveled his chair around to face her.

It was almost impossible to see her expression; the dim room combined with the light shining from the bathroom behind her rendered her little more than a silhouette. There was clearly a smirk in her voice though, and the alluring figure she cast as she leaned against the doorframe made him suspect that he was never going to get his work done if she had anything to do with it.

He made a show of running his eyes slowly down and back up her body, pretending that he needed any time at all to consider what his answer was going to be. He had his mouth half open to respond with a definite affirmative before he was interrupted by a voice that seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once.

"Commander," EDI's avatar flickered into existence next to the outer door of the cabin, shining with a cool blue light that cut efficiently through the darkness around it. "Miss Lawson requests your presence in the briefing room. A message has arrived that requires your immediate attention."

Jack growled and muttered testily. Shepard only caught the words "cold-blooded" and "bitch" before she disappeared behind the closing bathroom door. He sighed and ran a hand over his short hair.

"Have I said something wrong?" the AI asked, a tinge of concern in her tone that made him marvel over how human she was beginning to sound as time went on.

"Don't worry about it, EDI. I'm almost positive she's not talking about you." He smiled reassuringly, even while trying to ignore the beginnings of a headache. "Tell Miranda I'll be right down."

* * *

**Author's Notes**: Wow, so that took way more time than I thought it would. Not gonna lie - the slowness may very well get worse when I go back to school in September. Just try to bear with me on that. The good news is that this chapter ended up being a little longer than I thought, so I moved a scene that I already wrote to chapter 3. So... head start! We'll see if it helps any.

P.S. - Anyone else notice that one of the actresses in The Human Centipede is named Ashley Williams? Mass Effect Ashley would never have so much trouble dealing with a crazed German surgeon, though. At the very least, she would have been able to convince the guy to let her be the very front segment of the centipede_. _I mean, _come on_.


	3. Past in Present

Miranda was looking flawless, as usual, when Shepard trudged into the briefing room. Not a hair was out of place, her makeup was immaculate, and there were none of the dark circles beneath her eyes that the Commander himself sported, despite the early hour of the morning. He had stopped on the crew deck to pick up a mug of coffee on his way to the CIC, but the effects of the caffeine had yet to kick in, so just being in the same room with his bright-eyed and bushy-tailed XO had him experiencing both jealousy and an extra shot of exhaustion.

With a quickly suppressed yawn, he set his drink down on the long table that occupied the center of the room, mentally cursing the Cerberus personnel that had designed the most advanced communications array that he had ever seen yet still managed to leave out the chairs. Because there was nowhere to seat himself comfortably, he slouched to brace himself on the table's surface, both hands supporting the weight of his upper body. "What have you got for me?"

She didn't respond right away, instead frowning as she took in his rather haggard appearance. _Always looking out for her science project_, he thought fondly. "Is everything okay, Shepard? You look…" Trailing off, she raised an eyebrow inquisitively in lieu of an adjective that might offend him.

"Yeah, I'm fine." He offered a grateful smile, but waved away her concern. "I just have a lot on my mind lately. I've survived worse."

Though still appearing skeptical, Miranda replied with a knowing smile of her own. If anyone could fully comprehend the extent of his uncanny knack for survival, it was most definitely her. He had lost count of the number of times he had come back to the ship after rushing a charging krogan, or something equally rash, only to face the full wrath of Operative Lawson. She could be quite menacing when she wanted to be, and had so often greeted him with an exasperated scowl and a reproachful remark that could instill enough guilt to make a Catholic school nun proud.

"_You obviously don't appreciate what a pain in my arse it was to put you back together."_

He tried not to grin at the memory.

"Your friends at the Alliance want our help." One hand settled petulantly on her hip as if in a physical display of her distaste for the organization. "I knew once you broke ties with Cerberus that it was only a matter of time before they came crawling back."

"The Alliance? Really?" Shepard suddenly felt significantly more awake. "I was expecting to get a call from them just about the same time the first Reaper came knocking on the Citadel."

He tried not to sound too relieved for the sake of the moody woman across the table from him, but one of the many weights that he was carrying around on his back had actually started to lift at this piece of news. The Alliance had been the only home the man had ever known, after all. David Anderson was probably the only person in the entire galaxy, aside from his own crew, who Shepard trusted implicitly. He was willing to forgive their recent lack of support, if only for the reason that they didn't know the whole story.

He didn't allow himself to dwell on the question of whether Ashley Williams had anything to do with this.

"Yes, well, I'm sure they had to work themselves into a sufficient panic before contacting you." The brunette activated her omni-tool and brought up the message in question, her graceful fingers moving deftly over the device. "Admiral Hackett writes-" Miranda paused mid-sentence and glanced up at him with a shadow of a smirk. "Would you like me to skip past the inane boot-licking?"

Shepard actually let out a laugh, though had a feeling she was only making things up in an attempt to lighten his mood. He had never really taken Hackett for much of a boot-licker, even in the most dire of circumstances.

"Please do." He lifted a hand to rub at his chin, receiving a scratchy reminder that he had not yet shaved that morning. "I trust you to pick out the important parts."

"Of course, Commander," she assured, looking pleased at his amusement before getting right back to business. "The Alliance received reports of an attack on a human colony that was reminiscent of past attacks by the Collectors. They sent a team to investigate, but by the time they arrived, the perpetrators were gone along with all of the colonists."

"Definitely sounds familiar," he frowned.

"Well, that's about where the similarities end. The team found the colony in ruins with plentiful signs of resistance. Whoever did this was obviously without the advantage of seeker swarms."

He nodded, getting the feeling that he knew where all this was going. "So, what? They want me to solve this mystery for them?"

"Not quite. They already have a lead."

She plucked a data pad off the top of the small pile she had brought from her office, sliding it across the table to him. It was the dossier of a young human by the name of Roy Phillips.

"There was a ship in orbit when they arrived. When approached for questioning, it made a break for open space, and the Alliance vessel couldn't keep up." Miranda's voice took a bit of a sardonic turn. _Even the _ships_ in the Alliance can't manage to get the job done_, it seemed to say.

Shepard strategically ignored it. "So how do they know this guy was on it?"

"Apparently, Phillips has been making quite a name for himself causing havoc all over the Terminus Systems." Another quick dance of her fingers and the holographic display around her forearm disappeared. "There were all kinds of bounties on his head before this incident. The investigation team recognized the ship."

"A pirate." He furrowed his brow as he stared down at the dossier. Something about this just wasn't adding up. "If they think a pirate did all this, why do they need my help?"

"I couldn't tell you, Commander," she sighed.

He sunk into troubled silence, still focused on the file of some punk Hackett should have been able to handle in his sleep. They weren't telling him everything - that much was blatantly clear. More and more, this job was sounding less like a peace offering and more like some kind of test of his loyalty. And while he could handle the idea of having to prove himself to the Alliance all over again, he had dealt with more than enough of this secrecy bullshit from the Illusive Man. Shepard wasn't one to tolerate being kept in the dark for very long.

The door hissed open on the other end of the room, and both he and Miranda looked over at the same time that Jack came strolling in. At the sight of her, Shepard smiled - Miranda did not.

"That was fast." He slid an arm around the lithe woman's waist as she approached, savoring the soapy scent that hovered around her skin and feeling one more pang of regret over the fact that they could have been in his quarters under a hot stream of water at that moment.

"Didn't want to miss anything good," she said, never actually acknowledging that the former Cerberus operative was in the room – an improvement on their usual relationship, as far as he was concerned.

Jack looked as if she might say more, but then stopped herself as she caught sight of the dossier on the table. Eyes narrowing, she snatching it up and then slipped out of Shepard's grasp, moving to the end of the table and hopping up to sit on its edge. He… was finished reading, apparently.

Miranda rolled her eyes in response to the damage the convict was already inflicting on their productivity, for the life of her not able to understand why the Commander allowed her to undermine his authority at every turn. She had grudgingly come to admit that the biotic was too advantageous in combat situations to just leave her on Omega where she belonged, but there was little else she could see in the woman to respect.

And that wasn't even to mention the utter enigma that was Shepard's romantic attraction to her. The XO once again took in the near scrawny form, the tattoos, the clothing that made her chest look flat and hid the bottom half of her altogether, and tried to see what their leader was so attached to. Jack was sitting with her back hunched and legs spread indelicately, holding the datapad between her knees as she read through the report. She carried herself like a teenage boy, for God's sake.

Not to sound bitter or anything.

As if sensing that there were eyes on her, Jack finally looked in Miranda's direction, a leer stretching across her face as she caught the officer staring. "See anything you like, Princess?"

"No," she answered quite honestly. When this prompted only a quick shake of the head instead of the typical barrage of cursing and name-calling, she realized what a decidedly good mood Jack must have been in that morning.

"What's your damage, Lawson?"

"I'm simply trying to remember when exactly I invited you to this meeting."

A surge of anger traveled visibly through the smaller girl's body, something that gave Miranda an odd sense of satisfaction. Perhaps if Jack hated being treated like a difficult child so much, she should stop acting like one.

It looked for a moment as if things might start to escalate, but Shepard moved to where the biotic sat at the end of the table, settling a calming hand on her shoulder and shooting a pleading look over at his second-in-command. Miraculously, Jack's tensed muscles melted beneath his touch and her softening glare shifted to aim at the ground. Miranda only sighed and lifted a hand in acquiescence, turning and beginning to pace the width of the room.

Once calm again, Jack lifted her gaze back up to the Commander. "What d'you want with this guy?"

He gave her shoulder one last squeeze before he broke the contact, then leaned against the table beside her. "Information. The Alliance found him skulking around where some colonists went missing and want us to find out what he knows."

"Not much, if I had to guess," she chuckled derisively, and when Shepard quirked an eyebrow, she gestured down to the datapad in her hand. "We've met. It was way before he turned into a bigshot, though."

"You know him?" Miranda paused in her pacing, narrowing her eyes marginally, "How?"

Jack sighed as if merely speaking to the other woman was a distasteful chore, then tipped her head to look at her. With both hands, she gestured down to herself, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Uh… _pirate_."

Miranda huffed, but let it go.

"I'll make this easy for you," Jack continued, speaking once again to the man beside her. "I'm your in. You find me a way to this guy, and I'll get all the information you want out of him."

"By yourself? As a mole, you mean?" A twinge of anxiety announced its presence on Shepard's face as Jack nodded an affirmative. "I never really took you for the type to play spy games."

"You tryin' to say I can't do it?" Her voice gained an edge, as if daring him to try to pull the protective boyfriend card.

"No. It's just _dangerous_ is all. What if something happens? What if you need backup and we're half a planetary system away? How do we pull you out if we need to? I don't-" He paused, furrowing his brow at Jack's sudden frown. "What?"

"I thought you were gonna ease up with this shit."

"What shit? I'm only being practical."

"You _know_ what shit." Her jaw set with determination, she lowered her voice to a point where Miranda could hardly hear it. "Let me do this. I can help you here." There was a long pause, and she closed her eyes momentarily, as if she had to work herself up to saying the word she muttered next. "Please."

"Jack…"

"_Shepard_."

Miranda looked back and forth between her Commander and her shipmate, the latter's stare becoming increasingly hard and unyielding as the two of them appeared to have some kind of silent argument that frankly went right over her head. They apparently managed to come to a resolution somehow, as eventually Shepard broke the eye contact and threw up his hands with a defeated sigh.

"Fine. Fine! You win."

He jabbed his finger in the girl's direction, stopping short the grin that had begun to crack her previously somber face. "But we're going to do this _my_ way. And if Phillips sets one toe out of line – hell, if _either_ of you do - I'm aborting the whole thing."

Jack seemed satisfied with this, tossing the datapad she still held on top of the pile with the rest and looking quite pleased with herself. If possible, the man looked wearier than ever. He picked up his coffee mug again and glanced at Miranda. Her lips were pressed thinly together in disapproval. Allowing the convict's insubordination was one thing, but he was putting her in charge of missions now?

God help them all.

* * *

"I want you to bring Legion."

Shepard watched as the smallest divot formed between Jack's eyebrows, something he found surprisingly endearing seeing as it was the first warning sign that she was about to start pouting. She shot a glance over at the AI core from where she was sitting on one of the beds in the med bay; the Geth was focused on Mordin as the professor was hunched over a nearby operating table, fiddling with an electronic something that looked like a tiny bronze Tic Tac.

"Siccing your watchdog on me?"

"Well… yeah," he admitted, smiling as she gave him a half-hearted scoff. "My way, remember?"

"His way" was already beginning to wear on her nerves, he noticed. Though up until that point, she had been quite cooperative. Usually he had to drag her kicking and screaming if he wanted to get her anywhere near that room; the fact that she was letting Mordin and Dr. Chakwas mess with her bio-amp long enough to hide a tracking device inside of it was nothing short of miraculous. Every so often, the mild-mannered doctor would interject from where she stood at Jack's right with a "Tilt your head this way, Dear" or a "You might feel a bit of pressure now." Shepard knew that the situation was putting the biotic on edge – she didn't exactly have the best track record when it came to doctors, after all – and she had nearly pitched a fit when Miranda suggested this plan. At the first sign of resistance, however, the ex-operative had taken one look at the scantily clad woman and astutely countered her protests with, _"Where else are we going to bloody hide it_?"

She had a point.

He glanced down at the tabletop between them where Jack was tapping her fingers uneasily against the hard surface and covertly shifted his hand to rest on top of hers. The tapping stopped. Without looking down, she gripped the offered hand with a pressure that could have snapped all his bones in two, though he tried not to let his discomfort show on his face for fear of being declared a pussy. Again.

"I'd rather go alone."

"I know." Shepard gaze was stern as it met hers. "Not an option."

She seemed to realize that this wasn't a subject up for debate, recognizing the decisive tone of his voice as one she could not negotiate with. Jack nodded reluctantly, and after a moment of silence he flashed a grin. "Though if you're that torn up about going with Legion, you can take Grunt instead."

The incredulous scowl he earned in reply to his efforts made him laugh. "That's what I thought."

"Smartass."

Mordin approached from the other side of the room where he had been working, holding the tiny electronic carefully between his thumb and forefinger. Jack eyed him suspiciously the entire way over, but the professor seemed happily oblivious to the fact that she seemed ready to give him a black eye if he made any sudden moves.

"Finished with modifications. Should be functional at quite some distance now. Will allow us to follow without rousing suspicion, even during space travel. Not yet tested during FTL jumps, however." He stopped to take a breath and smiled, looking from his latest project to the woman in front of him. "Will have to rely on you for field test, Jack. Should keep things exciting."

Jack raised her eyebrows though made no comment, shooting a look over to Shepard instead. He only shrugged; Mordin had always come through before, as evidenced by the fact that they had not all been eaten alive by seeker swarms the moment they had set foot on the Horizon colony. He wasn't about to start questioning the salarian's dizzying intellect any time soon.

"Doctor," Mordin continued, dropping the high-tech little pill gingerly into Chakwas' hand. "You may do the honors. Should pop right in."

"_Pop right in_?" Jack repeated, disbelieving. Mordin looked over at her inquisitively. "If you can just _pop it in_, why do we have to do this in the med bay? Why couldn't _I_ do it?"

Apparently not fazed by her annoyance, he returned his attention to the doctor, peering over her shoulder as she placed the device. It camouflaged almost perfectly into the hardware that was already present. "Merely a precaution. Biotic implants sometimes touchy. Especially with biotics of your caliber. Without proper safety measures, can be dangerous, unstable."

"I'll show you unstable," she muttered under her breath.

Shepard pretended that he hadn't heard her. "Could you give her amp a full workup while you're at it, Doc?"

"For fuck's sake, Shepard! I'd know if anything was blown out from before. It's _fine_," Jack insisted, though Shepard still looked expectantly to Chakwas as the doctor made a few final adjustments to make sure the device was secure and hidden.

The greying woman smiled softly and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "She's fine, John."

"Just relax, okay?" Jack pleaded. "I'll get it done."

Shepard met Jack's earnest stare and let out a quiet sigh. Whenever he thought about her going off on this mission without him, his mind slipped inevitably back to the Collector base, back to her bleeding and shaking uncontrollably in his arms as he asked the rest of his squad whether anyone had any medi-gel left. It wasn't until that moment that he thought of what happened afterward.

_It was after the bleeding had stopped. After the sounds of the Collectors trying to force their way in through the sealed door behind them began growing louder, more insistent. After the lengthening pause in their assault started to make the crew edgy and anxious to move on. But Jack didn't look ready. _

_She was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall with her knees curled to her chest. She hadn't spoken since she had crushed that last seeker with her own bare fist. Shepard was afraid that she was having a breakdown as he watched her, seeing the occasional shiver ripple over her or a twitch like she could still feel something crawling but was trying to ignore it. She stared statically at the ground, her arms propped up on her knees and her head in her hands. He hadn't been able to bring himself to rush her._

_Thane was the one to finally approach him. "Commander," he began in his deep, croaking voice. The assassin laid a firm hand on Shepard's shoulder, glancing toward his downed squad mate with sympathy in his large, black eyes, then over at the door that was the only thing keeping the massing Collectors from overwhelming them all. "We can't stay here much longer."_

_Shepard nodded grimly with a muttered "I know." He relented, approached Jack hesitantly where she was sitting away from all of the others._

_He crouched before her, tilted his head to the side to catch her gaze. All the while he was trying to think of what they were going to do with her, how they could get her safely back to the ship without losing anyone else for the battle ahead. _

"_Hey," he began lamely, and she didn't reply. Was she okay? Did she need more medi-gel? Could she still walk on her own? Any of these questions might have been good places to start, what he probably would have asked anyone else on his team in the same situation. _

"_You still got some fight left in you?" was what he asked instead._

_Her eyes snapped immediately up to his when he spoke, bright with tenacity – a stark contrast to the broken, haunted stare that he realized he shouldn't have been expecting. A wave of admiration swelled within him before she even gave him her answer. _

"_Fuck yes."_

He smiled briefly, seeing the very same determination in her eyes.

"I know you will."

* * *

There was only one person to talk to when matters of the galaxy's dark underbelly were concerned, and luckily enough, the _Normandy_ wasn't too far from where she sat atop her self-appointed throne.

The unspoken arrangement between Shepard and Aria T'Loak was a temporary one, certainly. It was a friendship of convenience, an alliance that one or the other of them would break as soon as it became too much trouble to uphold. Shepard knew this, trusted the asari just about as far as he could toss an angry krogan, but damn if securing a place on her good side didn't pay off. He kept reminding himself of this fact as he made his way through the dim and bustling streets of Omega, trying not to think about what kind of dodgy work she would cook up as repayment for this next favor he was asking of her. Legion, Jack, and Garrus were following close behind him, the four of them cutting rather imposing figures as they made a beeline for Afterlife.

He could feel the pulsing beat from the club practically as soon as he set foot on the station, as if Afterlife itself were some immense heart that kept the rest of the asteroid running. Following that analogy made Aria and her cronies the lifeblood – a metaphor that he was sure the pretty blue narcissist would have appreciated. They bypassed the line that stretched from the main entrance, eliciting much whining and groaning from those whom the elcor bouncer had kept waiting. The ones who caught sight of how heavily armed the passing group was, however, wisely fell silent. Once inside, the four were greeted by the usual flurry of lights and music and half-dressed asari dancers.

He glanced back at the rest of the team, holding back a smirk when he noticed that both Jack and Garrus couldn't seem to stop glancing over at the bar. "Why don't you three wait here? No sense in just standing around while Aria and I talk."

It was apparently the right thing to say, as immediately Jack broke into a grin and thumped the turian on the back. "Hell yeah! First round's on me, Vakarian."

Garrus watched as the biotic took off, then shot a glance back at his commander. At least _he_ was putting some effort into not looking too eager to be drinking on the job. "You, uh… you'll know where to find us if you need anything."

Shepard nodded, watching for a moment as Garrus left to follow Jack with Legion wandering distractedly after him, the flaps on the top of its flashlight head flaring as it took in the sights around it. He then turned toward Aria's lair overlooking the club and caught Anto's eyes – well… a pair of Anto's eyes actually, and the rest followed suit soon after the batarian recognized who he was looking at. The guard's lip curled into a grimace, coaxing a small grin onto Shepard's face. Apparently somebody wasn't too happy to see him come back so soon since his last visit. But then it was kind of hard to tell; batarians always looked grouchy, didn't they? He hoped that Aria, at least, would be more hospitable.

* * *

"I'm not sure I see the point in tipping you off to any more easy scores if you're only going to blow them up."

Shepard stood at the foot of the staircase that led up to where the austere asari was seated, a half dozen of her bodyguards watching his every move. He paid no attention to them, having grown used to the scrutiny that he drew every time he came within about a hundred yards of T'Loak. Instead he smiled, just a little bit sheepish as he was reminded of the mission that had, admittedly, gone to complete shit. "So you heard about that."

"I heard that Pietas has a new crater." Aria smirked and nodded toward the seat beside her, signaling that he should make himself comfortable. It was just about as friendly as she ever got. "Who else would that have been?"

"Touché." He grinned briefly in reply and took the offered seat, trying to inconspicuously glance down into the club as he did so. He had agreed to rein in his protective nature when it came to Jack – he was confident that she could handle herself and intended to keep his word on that. He was not, however, quite so confident that all of the people around her didn't still need protection. He hoped that Garrus would serve as a calming influence. He couldn't get a clear view of them, but wasn't too worried; he would probably hear at least a few screams and explosions if anyone set her off.

"I'm not here about money. I'm looking for someone."

"I think you've already picked this station clean of genius scientists and suicidal vigilantes, Shepard," she quipped.

He shook his head. "I don't want to recruit him. Actually, I doubt he's going to be too happy to see me."

Aria arched her eyebrow, her interest piqued. He wondered whether she ever gave as much of her time to pirates as she did to ex-Spectres, whether she might have already been trying to decide whether continued cooperation with Shepard was worth throwing one of her other contacts to the dogs. "Name?"

"Phillips."

"Roy Phillips?" At Shepard's nodded confirmation, the asari chuckled to herself, taking the man off guard. It wasn't exactly the reaction he had been expecting.

"Well hell, Shepard. That's an easy one." Another smirk tugged at her lips. "He's here."

"Here?" He furrowed his brow, a touch of unease beginning to bubble up in the pit of his stomach. It was the feeling he got whenever things were about to stop going his way. "What do you mean he's here?"

"Last I saw, he was still down by the bar." She jerked her head back toward the crowded scene below them, where she claimed he could find the man that he was after.

Also where he had left his squad - where he had left the one woman on whom the success or failure of this entire mission was hinged. That one restless, volatile, impulsive woman.

_Shit_.

* * *

**Author's Notes**: Got a couple things to say:

1) I actually have no idea if that thing on Jack's ear is an amp. It is now because it makes things convenient for me.

2) Fallout 3 fans with good memories might recognize the pirate's name.


	4. The Scylla

"Anyone ever told you that you have a giant fucking head?"

Garrus' visor slipped down Jack's face for about the third time since she had put it on, giving the turian yet another small heart attack before she caught it and readjusted it over her left eye. Even in the dark lighting of Afterlife, it was easy to make out the jovial gleam on her face as she watched him stress out over her handling of his expensive gear, the soft blue glow of the display illuminating her expression. It was probably letting her know every time she made his blood pressure spike.

"Just be careful with that, alright? It's custom."

"Relax, Vakarian. I got it," she assured distractedly, having already shifted her attention to the crowd of people on the far end of the room. Garrus could see the targeting systems working busily to magnify and focus on the distant objects from where he sat on the barstool beside her. "How much booze would it take before you agreed to show me how to snipe with this thing?"

He gave her a sideways glance and a good-natured bark of laughter, finding it difficult to picture her demonstrating the patience required to handle a sniper rifle. He was pretty sure he'd never seen her with anything other than a shotgun and that massive Carnifex pistol. "A lot more than I've had - that's for damn sure."

"Figured that much." She smirked and immediately pounded her fist on the counter to get the attention of the salarian wiping glasses clean a little way down the bar. "Hey, bartender! We're dry over here."

Garrus only shook his head. The small remaining part of him that still thought like a good turian soldier was nagging him, doubting that Shepard would be too ecstatic about coming back to find the two of them on the wrong side of tipsy.

But not so much that he would refuse the offer of another drink.

He wrapped his slender fingers around the one that was already in front of him, lifting it just enough to swirl the brightly colored dextro-amino liquor around the glass a few times before he brought it to his mouth. On the way to downing the last of it, however, his eyes caught on Legion and something about the geth made him pause. It was sitting, completely immobile, in the seat on the other side of Jack, its optics anchored rigidly on something across the club. Garrus set his drink back down.

"Legion?" It gave no response, spurring a flutter of anxiety in the depth of his gut. "Legion! Is everything okay?"

It turned its head toward him then, its metallic voice barely reaching him over the throbbing bass of the music. "We have located the human."

"Right. Great. The human. That narrows it down," muttered Jack. She was slumped with her arms crossed on the surface of the bar, her chin resting neatly on top of them as she watched the bartender refill her glass with a clear liquid that smelled overwhelmingly of paint thinner. It was only another moment before she perked up, suddenly looking significantly more sober and alert as she narrowed her eyes in Legion's direction. "You don't mean…"

She and Garrus exchanged a glance before they both turned back to the geth. "You saw Phillips?"

The AI looked slowly from one squadmate to the other now that it had their full attention. "Yes, the target," it replied, before turning its head back toward the crowd on the far side of the room. "The target is here."

* * *

After hurried goodbyes to Aria, Shepard scrambled back down the staircase that led to the club floor. He wanted to believe that he had nothing to worry about, that Phillips and Jack had not yet seen each other, and his team could still duck out without incident to regroup and form a legitimate plan. However, if all his time as commander had taught him anything, it was to be a firm believer that anything that could go wrong would undoubtedly do so.

For that reason, he was not in the least bit surprised to find that Jack was already out of her seat when he practically skidded to a stop at the foot of the stairs and she finally came into his view, her gaze fixed on a scruffy-looking man who was making his way across the floor. There was no picture in the Alliance dossier he had been studying, but the look on the woman's face was more than enough conformation that this man was who they were looking for.

And of course, he was on a path that would send him right past where his squad was sitting.

"Don't do anything stupid," he breathed, and as if she had somehow heard his plea despite the deafening surroundings, Jack turned her head and caught his eye.

He could practically see the gears spinning furiously in her mind, though her expression betrayed none of her forming plans. She took half a step backward, away from both her commander and the approaching criminal, her eyes flicking from one to the other and then back again. Shepard got an absurd flash from some nature show that he had watched days before – a cornered lioness, furrowed and ready to bare her teeth and leap at the nearest throat.

He took another step but froze at the look that Jack shot in his direction, one that very clearly said "_stay the fuck put_." Another beat and an unfamiliar voice rose up above the music, an audible end to any semblance of control he had on the situation.

"Jack?"

* * *

"Jack? Is that you?"

She clenched her hands into fists at the sound of her name and turned her attention back to Phillips. He had stopped walking and was staring at her with hopeful recognition in his bright blue eyes and this big stupid grin on his youthful face, making her wonder why the hell he seemed so happy to see her. He looked almost exactly how she remembered him, his hair still cropped short, but not quite short enough for him to not get called a fairy if he had ever been straight-laced enough for the military. His features were sharp, almost feminine, and only balanced out by his lean, muscular form and stubbly facial hair that made the fair skin of his face and neck look gritty. He still looked like a fucking kid in a beard, just a filled-out version of the scrawny ex-duct rat she had met years before.

_This_ was the new scourge of the Terminus systems? She would have appreciated the hilarity a lot more if she, Phillips, and Shepard weren't currently forming a triangle of impending clusterfuck.

The pirate twisted to follow Jack's ambivalent gaze and locked almost immediately onto Shepard. His grin disappeared, his formerly exuberant face going a little slack as recognition seemed to wash over him. Of course. What outlaw nowadays wasn't living in fear of turning around one day to see the galaxy's first human Spectre breathing down their neck? "Is that…?"

"Bet your ass it is," she muttered, meeting Shepard's gaze once more and noting the fact that he looked about ready to burst from the urge to swoop in and save her like the knight in shining armor he had always been before. It was sweet - sort of endearing, she finally admitted. And also hopelessly misplaced.

While Phillips' attention was away from her, she gave the man a brief smirk, trying her best to reassure him that this was all still under control, despite appearances. Well, okay, there was that and the thought that he probably would have called her ape-ass crazy for even thinking of letting loose the scheme that was beginning to take shape in her head. See, some people just got way too caught up in details. They had been trying to find Phillips, and guess what? It turned out to be a little easier than they had expected. Jack didn't see the problem, only the opportunity this presented. Sometimes diffusing a situation was unnecessary.

Sometimes a clusterfuck was exactly what was needed.

Garrus wasn't paying any attention to her, was still sitting tensed with one hand hovering over his firearm as he waited for Shepard to make the first move. So when she yanked him straight off of his stool, he didn't even put up a fight.

He let out a strangled yelp as Jack drew him into a headlock and pressed her newly-drawn pistol to his temple. Their severely mismatched heights were forcing him to twist at an odd angle, bending him sideways enough that he couldn't gain enough leverage to throw her off and ensuring that he would have, at the very least, a rather uncomfortable crick in his spine when this was all over. When he tried to struggle, she only tightened her grip, a mass effect field shimmering over her skin to compete with his turian strength. "What are you-?"

"Shut it!" she hissed, then raised her voice so that both Phillips and her dashing knight could hear her. "Take one more step, Shepard, and I'll blow this guy's fuckmothering face off!"

As soon as she grabbed Garrus, Shepard had drawn his gun so fast it was like a knee-jerk reflex, the barrel pointing steadily at her forehead as the two of them stared each other down. She was oddly pleased with his reaction, a little part of her wondering whether he had it in him to actually shoot her if she had been serious about plugging his best friend full of lead. A couple seconds passed in tense silence as her comrades seemed to be catching up to her train of thought.

The crowd had begun to take notice of them. She could feel them eyeing her nervously as they all began shuffling back and out of the way of the potential shootout. There was a murmur of anxiety passing steadily through the room, but there was minimal running and screaming; it _was_ Omega, after all. No doubt Aria's men were all keeping a very close eye on her as well. They had probably only let things get this far at all because they recognized Shepard and his crew.

She spared a glance over at Legion, noticing it was still standing around like a useless idiot. It was hard to tell since, y'know, it didn't really have a face, but it didn't seem to be sure which side it was supposed to be supporting. She had told Shepard that she would bring it along, so she would. It was the least she could do, seeing as she was probably on her way to driving him to an aneurysm at the moment. "Want to help me out here, Chicken Legs?"

Legion turned and focused on her, tearing its gaze from where it had been on its leader, probably waiting for new orders from him. It was unresponsive for a moment, before its almost maddeningly emotionless voice rang out again. "We are unable to reach consensus. Please specify request."

"Just point your gun at somebody, will ya?" she growled.

With minimal hesitation, Legion leveled its rifle at its own Commander. Phillips, looking increasingly bewildered as the situation progressed, also aimed his gun in Shepard's direction.

"Jack, what's going on?" the pirate demanded. Jack might have been impressed by the guts he was suddenly deciding to show if his shooting hand hadn't been shaking like a leaf. She smothered a grin. He was buying the act. And why wouldn't he? Who out of her old "friends" would have ever suspected that she was actually working for _Commander Shepard_ instead of on the run from him?

"You got a ship on this rock?"

He gave her a brief smile, something flickering in his eyes that she couldn't quite place. It made her a little uneasy. "Is that your way of asking for a ride?"

"No. It's my way of saying, 'you leave me stranded on this station with a fucking Spectre and I will hunt your ass down.'"

"Fair enough."

"Jack." Shepard's voice drew her full attention back to him, back to those cool blue eyes focused on her from over his pistol. "It doesn't have to be like this."

She thought he might have just been acting, throwing a few lines in to make the scene more believable, before she realized that he was serious. He was giving her a way out, a second chance to change her mind and just let him beat the shit – and as much information as possible –out of the kid. It was actually tempting. She was probably going to be gone for a few days, tops. Just long enough to get some manipulating done before Phillips dropped her off at a fueling station somewhere. But even so… hell, she'd never admit it to anyone but herself, but she was going to miss him.

"Yeah. It does," she responded decisively, soaking in his presence for a last couple of seconds before giving Garrus a good shove. The turian stumbled into the man, knocking him momentarily off balance and giving Jack the opportunity to send them both flying with her biotics. A couple of screams pierced through the crowd, civilians afraid that a fight had finally broken out; it was a good signal that it was time for her and her ride to leave.

With a nod to Legion, she grabbed a hold of Phillips' collar and tugged him toward the nearest exit. She weaved quickly through the clustered dancers and drunkards, the pirate and the AI following close behind her.

Left to the mercy of Jack's throw, Shepard and Garrus landed in a heap a few good yards away from where they had left the ground. Shepard grunted as the sniper's elbow jabbed into his gut on their way to untangling themselves and Garrus mumbled an apology as he sat up. They ignored their continued audience, getting quite a lot of space from the confused and frightened group anyway. Shepard gingerly rotated his shoulder, making sure that everything was still moving properly after the area took the brunt of both his and the large alien's fall.

"Guess it never occurred to her to pull her punches." He winced a little, finding the spot that was undoubtedly going to form an impressive bruise by the following morning.

"I noticed that," Garrus agreed, rubbing at his neck where he had been rather forcefully held in the headlock. "Said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: _really_ glad she's on our side."

Shepard grinned just a little, looking over toward the door through which Jack and Legion had left. He was silent for a long moment before he spoke again. "She's going to be fine."

"Yeah," Garrus began to chuckle, "Yeah, _she's_ going to be fine. Phillips, though?"His laughter continued, grew, then quickly spread to the man beside him until the both of them were breathless where they sat on the floor of the club, their leftover adrenaline making them almost giddy.

The next time the commander looked up, the patrons who hadn't already left were giving them looks like they had lost their minds. He finally sobered up the best that he could, though doubted his stoic tough-guy aura could be saved, and climbed to his feet, holding out his hand to help his friend up.

"Come on. Let's get back to the _Normandy_ before we lose the tracking signal."

"Fine." Garrus grasped the offered arm and stood. "But after this is over? I'm going to need some damn shore leave."

* * *

The docking bay was as busy as it always was on Omega, filled nearly to the brim with mercenaries, smugglers, and the odd honest merchant looking to make a few credits. It would have been the perfect place to get thoroughly lost in a crowd if Jack had thought the three of them were actually being chased. Phillips had taken the lead once he had pulled his head out of his ass again, seeming quite eager to get as far away from that station as was physically possible. She couldn't really blame him for that. Jack was behind him, her patience quickly wearing away to nothing as she pushed her way through the teeming sea of people to keep up with him. Legion was bringing up the rear, or at least it had been when she had last checked. She had put as much effort as she was going to into bringing it along. If it fell behind, she wasn't going to waste any time waiting for it.

"There! That one's mine," Phillips called back to her, pointing to a ship that was coming up on their left. Jack craned her neck to get a better look at it, struggling to see over the heads of everyone around her until they came nearly all the way to the airlock. It looked… like shit, actually. Like he had literally gone around collecting space debris and piecing it together until it was in the general shape of a ship. The armor panels were mismatched where they weren't almost completely obscured by dirt. The hull was deeply scored with scratches and scrapes, along with the occasional scorch mark that was probably left over from some vicious space battle or another. Jack had heard of war ships that would forego the typical superficial repairs meant to keep them looking shiny and new for the sake of intimidation. In this particular case, though, she couldn't really tell whether Phillips had meant for the hunk of junk to look scary or if he was just being a tightwad with his credits. In any case, the only reason _she_ was afraid to go near it was because she suspected that it would fall apart the second she set foot on the gangplank.

But it _had_ outrun an Alliance ship, hadn't it? If that was true, then there must have at least been something decent under the hood. Before she followed her new companion into the airlock, she caught the name of the vessel, scrawled in white letters across that scarred and dust-covered hull. _Scylla_.

"She's great, isn't she?"

She gave him a look like he was delusional, hearing the jarring _clang_ of metal against metal as Legion stepped in beside her and the automatic door shut behind them. "Not really the first word that comes to mind."

"Don't let her appearance fool you." His features lit up momentary as the decontamination sequence started up. "This is the fastest ship in the galaxy, right here."

_Let's see her outrun the _Normandy, she thought, though kept it to herself.

"Speaking of appearances," he continued, "We didn't really have time for proper greetings back there, did we?" He took a step closer to her, his eyes wandering south of her face for as long as he dared to let them. For fuck's sake. She was on his ship for ten seconds and he was already eyeing her up? "You look good, Jack."

She arched her eyebrow, the picture of indifference though she tensed subtly under his stare. Now _this_ was the seedy, arrogant ass she remembered. Funny how he got that cocky swagger back as soon as he was out of Shepard's sight. "Yeah? Wish I could say the same for you."

"And charming as ever, I see."

She clenched her teeth as a grin split his face, silently reminding herself that she wasn't allowed to cause any bodily harm. She still needed him. For the next few days, at least. She only had to reign in her temper for a few days.

And either he had forgotten how hard she could punch or he could somehow sense the dramatic increase in her self-restraint; she could see from the self-assured spark in his blue eyes. Blue like Shepard's except… not at all like Shepard's. Now that she was able to get a better look at the man, she couldn't help but compare the two of them. And hell, maybe she was a little biased, but there didn't seem to be too much of a contest. Shepard's eyes were the color of the sky on Pragia right before a rainstorm hit, from what she could remember of glimpses stolen through the skylight outside of her cell. More grey than blue sometimes, depending on the lighting. They were eyes that could make a girl forget where she was. Phillips' eyes were brighter, more saturated, like the color of hard candy. They looked fake, and the trend continued past their shade. There was always something going on behind those eyes, some weasely, underhanded little scheme that always seemed to end with someone getting stabbed in the back.

Back in the old days, being the lust object of a ship's captain was good luck, made things infinitely easier on her. Any time she needed anything, she would know exactly how to go about getting it. Now, though…

She was thinking that she would rather put a campfire out with her face than use any of _that_ kind of persuasion on him.

"This how you treat every damsel in distress you pick up?" She wrinkled her nose at the thought. "Leer at them until they're either desperate enough to drop their pants or they smack you?"

He shrugged with a smirk. "It's worked out alright for me so far."

"Well, I'm warning you now, Roy. You touch me, and you'll be spitting your teeth out your asshole."

He held both his hands up where she could see them in order to placate her, then gave her an "after you" gesture with flourish as the door to the bridge finally whooshed open. She headed through it and he moved to follow her, but slowed when Legion fell into step beside him. He looked at the geth as if only really noticing it was there in that moment, silent as it had been, giving it a suspicious grimace when he seemed to realize that its optics had been tracking his every move.

"The hell is that?"

Jack glanced over her shoulder at the two of them staring each other down and frowned. She knew that bringing Legion along was going to make things more complicated. She was never gonna let the boss man live it down if her little synthetic bodyguard blew her cover. "VI. You're not allowed to touch that either." She was glad that the synthetic seemed to know enough to keep quiet.

"Not like any VI I've ever seen. Where'd you get it?"

With a sigh, she stopped and turned completely around to face him, crossing her arms impatiently. "You really gonna make me stand here and play twenty questions, or are you gonna show me where I can bunk?"

"Plenty of room in my cabin," he offered, earning another glare.

"Engineering level will be just fine, thanks."

* * *

All the way down to the bottom of the ship, the crew of the _Scylla_ stopped what they were doing, stared, nudged their mates, sized her up as she walked by.

Well… a good portion of their attention was probably saved for the geth that was, for some reason, being allowed to wander around freely, but she _felt_ like all of them were staring at her. Living on the _Normandy_ for so long had lowered her guard, inch by inch, so that returning to the hostile environment in which she was raised was as shocking to her system as getting dunked into a tub of ice water. She was surprised by how much it was affecting her, how much she must have changed in the past months, despite herself. However, she still didn't regret coming onboard to play the criminal again. Maybe it would be good for her, keep her sharp.

She had seen what happened to people like her when they didn't stay sharp.

"So," began Phillips, jerking her abruptly out of her thoughts. He glanced back at her briefly, then left her staring at the back of his uneven haircut when he faced forward again. "Last I heard of you, you were getting shipped off to _Purgatory_."

"Is that a question?" would normally have been both the beginning and the end of her response, but she had been sent with an agenda; it probably would have been counter-productive to tell the guy to shut his pie hole. It wasn't likely that she'd be able to get anything useful out of him without a little patience and effort, so if that meant small talk, then… ugh.

Shit, who was she kidding? What had she gotten herself into?

"Well, _Purgatory'_s just a few hunks of floating scrap metal now."

"Yeah, it was all over the news when that place got wrecked," he replied, chuckling. "And I'm sure you had _nothing_ to do with it."

Jack shrugged modestly and suppressed a grin, a swell of warm feelings coming over her when she remembered the utter chaos that had helped to get her blood flowing again when she woke up from cryo. "What about you? How the hell did you find someone stupid enough to give you a ship?"

They reached a staircase and descended, the light dimming and the low hum of the engine growing louder as they did. So far, the interior of the ship wasn't much prettier than the outer shell. It was all dusky catwalks and exposed piping, a vessel that Tali could have had a field day with if the amount of flaws her untrained eye picked out was any good indication of how well things were running. When they reached the subdeck, though, at least that felt familiar; in her experience, they all looked about the same no matter what kind of ship they were on.

Dark, quiet, and hard to find. It would do.

Phillips was quiet until they reached level ground again, ducking under a low-hanging beam as he led her into the room, empty aside from a few storage crates stacked against the wall. "Guess I was just lucky enough to find someone who saw my potential."

He turned toward her and, again, she caught that look she had noticed back in Afterlife and felt a tug of anxiety in the pit of her stomach, her hackles rising on the back of her neck. Why had it been so easy to convince him to let her tag along? They had lived on the same ship together, they had hijacked, stolen, and killed together, but they still had never been particularly close. She had never been friendly enough to warrant any kind of debt and had never been hostile enough for a vendetta. All the same – instinct had kept her alive so far, and she wasn't about to turn her back on it. He was up to something.

Jack narrowed her eyes. "What potential?"

For once, she wasn't being funny. But Phillips seemed to take it that way or else was avoiding the subject, not offering anything more than a mockery of a wounded pout as he turned back toward the stairs.

"I'll make sure the crew knows not to bother you," he assured. "I'm short enough on men without you smearing them all over the walls."

He left her question unanswered, hanging uneasily in the air as the biotic and the AI listened to his footsteps disappearing into the upper levels of the ship.

* * *

**Author's Notes: **This chapter gave me problems. Unforeseen circumstances dragged me away from writing for a while so this was written in little bits over a looong period of time, which screws with my head. Eventually, I stared at it so long that I just had to post it or go insane. Next chapter's coming pretty easily, though, so it won't take as long as this one did. Pinky swear.

Also, figured out that I can turn to the show Dexter when I find need for creative cuss words (ie: fuckmothering). I love Debra Morgan.


	5. Serendipity

A couple of days passed without Jack finding another opportunity to talk to the captain. She spent as much of that time as possible in her makeshift quarters, avoiding the stares of the crew, and subsequently, any trouble she might have stirred up among the lecherous dogs. It wasn't anything she hadn't dealt with a hundred times before. In fact, she fell back into her old defense mode with unnerving ease, as if she had never left the life where she had to watch herself every time she turned her back.

She really only had to deal with the presence of Phillips' men once, when they brought a cot down for her the first night. The two humans who had apparently drawn the short straws were sufficiently intimidated - either by her silent occupation on top of one of the storage crates as she cleaned her pistol or the glowing, monocular stare of Legion from the darkest corner of the room – to warn their comrades to stay the hell away. While this fortunate outcome saved her from having to deal with their bullshit, it also left her and her stoic companion with basically nothing to do but sleep and stare at each other as boredom began to eat away at her sanity. Not that she could manage any kind of restful sleep while Phillips had her waiting for the inevitable knife in her back anyway.

And to be perfectly honest, having the geth around staring at her all hours of the day and night wasn't exactly calming her nerves.

"This is stupid," she finally declared, sitting up from her reclining position on her cot and propping her elbows on her knees. Legion had hardly moved since they had boarded but turned its head toward her, the flaps rimming its shining eye fluttering into an expression that was vaguely recognizable as curiosity.

"I thought he'd be down here harassing me all the time. At this rate I won't see him again 'til he's kicking us off the ship." Jack hopped onto her feet and crossed the room toward the stairs, rolling her shoulders to work out the stiffness in her muscles. "I'm going to find him."

"We will accompany you to interrogate the target."

"Nuh-uh." She paused once she was a few steps up, shooting a look behind her to find that Legion was already at the base of the staircase and primed to follow her. "Did you see how he reacted to you? He's not gonna say shit while you're around."

"Irrelevant," it insisted, immovable. "Shepard-Commander's orders were clear."

Jack raised her eyebrows at that last part, slowly turning all the way around to fully face her crewmate. "What was that?"

It did not answer immediately. A heavy silence fell over them for a long moment, broken only by the quiet whirring of Legion's expression continuously shifting as if in a nervous tic. Jack clamped her fists around the handrails on either side of her, leaning down toward the AI with a suspicious scowl. "What exactly did he say to you?"

Legion finally stilled when it spoke again. "We are not to let you out of our sight." The eye on her shifted up to the ceiling above them. "This platform is not equipped to see through the two floors required to monitor the captain's quarters. Therefore, we must accompany you."

Well, that was just impressive. The two of them weren't even on the same ship, and Shepard could still manage to irritate her.

Jack knit her brow, doing her very best to ignore the suspicion that a robot had just given her cheek so that she could concentrate on the unexpectedly difficult task of _leaving the goddamn room_. "This is my mission. That means I'm in charge here, right?"

"Correct."

"So you have to follow _my_ orders, don't you?"

"Yes," Legion granted. "Excluding the occasions on which they conflict with Shepard-Commander's orders."

"The whole point of us being here is to get this guy to talk," she countered, her efforts to hide her frustration tightening her jaw until she was speaking through her clenched teeth. "If the boss man had known that the easiest way to wrap this shit up included getting you to fuck off, maybe he would have picked his words a little more carefully."

"…Acknowledged." It gave a slight incline of its head, as if conceding.

Legion was quiet long enough to convince her that she'd actually gotten somewhere. She even started climbing the stairs again. She had nearly reached the first landing before the voice trailed after her, delivering a quick prod to her patience with a relentless, "However-"

"Legion," she cut in, swinging back around. She jabbed her finger at the synthetic, speaking sharply as if it were a dog that had suddenly been stricken half deaf. "Stay."

And miraculously, Legion did stay. It remained obediently at the bottom of the stairs as the biotic climbed toward the upper floors, shooting intermittent looks of suspicion back at the AI to make sure that it still hadn't moved. Legion didn't move.

Not until she disappeared around the corner, at least.

Immediately afterward, the geth strode purposefully back into the room behind it, optics drifting up to the ceiling and the vent it had noted days ago as a possible emergency escape route from the ship's basement. In the time it took to flutter an eyelash, distance was determined, optimal levels of force and momentum were calculated, and Legion was already off the ground.

It grabbed hold of a low-hanging beam and swung its bottom half up towards the ceiling. With a jarring _clang_, the grate that covered the entrance popped cleanly out of its place and Legion slid with an almost reptilian grace into the vent and out of sight.

* * *

Jack managed to make it to the upper deck without getting lost, something she considered a small victory in itself seeing as she had only made the trip once before. She felt eyes on her almost constantly from the moment she left the subdeck, curious and probing, though they flickered away as soon as she glanced in their direction.

She didn't actually know where the captain's cabin was, but it was a small enough ship that she couldn't waste _too_ much time wandering around the bridge before it turned up. Judging by how skittish the crew had seemed around her so far, nobody was going to stop her anyway. She had worked her way nearly halfway to the back of the ship before a voice from an approaching doorway made her stop in her tracks.

"Do you have her?"

Her?

The paranoid mercenary part of Jack's brain immediately lit up like a Christmas tree and began screaming at her to either retreat back down to Legion or barrel through the doorway with her biotics blazing before anyone got the chance to notice she was there. She began to lean toward the latter, but then swallowed both urges altogether. This was strictly a fact-finding mission, she reminded herself again, though was sounding less and less convincing in her own head. She pressed herself against the wall instead in order to creep closer and hear the conversation more clearly.

The voice she had heard was a man's, unfamiliar, with a slight accent that she couldn't quite place. It was probably coming from some kind of communications array, she realized when she picked out a light crackle of static; she must have stumbled onto the _Scylla_'s debriefing room. As her gut continued to assure her that whatever was going on was sure to end with her being fucked over, Jack wondered again why exactly she had volunteered for this. They should have picked Thane's scaly ass up from his shore leave on the Citadel. Fuck.

"Yeah." Phillips' voice now. "Yeah, I've got her. Though I can't help but point out that you failed to mention _anything_ about Commander fucking Shepard getting involved in this."

Okay, pretty safe to assume they were talking about her. Double fuck.

"I gave you all the information that was necessary in acquiring the subject – nothing more."

"Hey! This is my ass we're talking about here. I can't 'acquire' _shit_ for you if I get blown fulla holes 'cause I swiped a Spectre's bounty out from under him."

A first, there was no response. Then laughter came flowing through the communicator that grated on her almost as much as it probably grated on Roy. She _knew_ this whole thing had reeked of a setup. The money-grubbing son of a bitch had sold her out. She would've caved his head in right then if her curiosity hadn't convinced her to wait and find out more about the apparent puppeteer.

Then she would hunt that bastard down too.

"The hell is so funny, old man?"

"Bounty," the voice repeated, unperturbed by the pirate's anger as the laughter trickled slowly down to nothing. "Is that what she told you?"

"Did she lie?"

Suppressing some final chuckles and clearing his throat, the man seemed to quell the rest of his mirth. "Nevermind. It doesn't matter now."

"She's got some synthetic with her, too. Says it's a VI, but it creeps me the hell out."

"Mmm," came the response, sounding intrigued. "Disable that as well. I'd like to take a look at it. How have you contained her?"

"Haven't yet." There was a light creak, like from someone leaning against a desk or shifting their weight in a chair. "She still thinks she's getting dropped off at the next refueling station."

A long pause settled into the conversation. Jack could imagine her old friend beginning to squirm as the silence dragged on; she could feel the building tension even from outside the room. Wrong answer, apparently.

"I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly," said the stranger, his voice unnervingly calm. "You are traveling with the most powerful human biotic in the galaxy, fully intending to betray her, and didn't think that it might be a good idea to incapacitate her."

"I was gonna." Phillips sounded a little defensive. "Just-"

"Just _what_?" the man spat, finally giving evidence of his anger.

"Relax! She hasn't left engineering since she boarded. Once we're close, I'll…"

He trailed off, and Jack resisted the urge to peek into the room to figure out the reason for the sudden quiet. His contact seemed just as confused as she was, prompting the pirate after a few moments with a drawn-out "Yes?"

"I heard something."

Jack's blood went cold as footsteps thumped through the room toward the hallway and her current listening spot, and she bit her lip to keep from letting out a curse. How had he heard her? She hadn't fucking moved.

Then, just as she began to back away, she heard it too – a movement behind her. She had just enough time to turn around and see the turian that had managed to get the jump on her, just enough time to glow blue with energy as she prepared to smash the bastard's head through the wall, but the alien was fast and ready for her attack.

With a violent crack, the butt of his gun connected with her forehead and she crumpled to the floor. The biotics surrounding her body faded as she slipped into unconsciousness.

"Hey, Boss. Look what I found," the turian smirked as Phillips appeared in the doorway.

Neither of them noticed the single, shining eye watching from the grate in the ceiling above them.

* * *

Miranda strode at a brisk pace out of the elevator when it reached the crew deck, making a beeline toward port observation and the makeshift lounge into which it had evolved once the destruction of the Collector base had left the crew with plenty of extra downtime.

It was where one naturally went looking for Shepard after a search of the CIC and his cabin proved fruitless. Normally, that was a subject of some annoyance with the straight-laced officer (couldn't he at least _pretend_ to be working, damn it?) but at the moment, futile arguments were far from her mind as she wrung her hands in uncharacteristic anxiety for a moment longer out in the hallway. A brief hesitation and one deep breath later, she was stepping into the room as the door opened with a hiss of air.

As expected, Shepard was there with Garrus. It was increasingly common to see the two of them – plus Joker, whenever they could manage to pry him away from the pilot's chair - in the lounge watching films on an Omni-tool. It seemed such a normal, reassuring scene that she hated to interrupt it, hated having to deliver the news that she knew Shepard had been dreading for days.

Shepard was crouched beside a sizable collection of movie cases, listing off a nearly unbroken stream of titles to the turian sitting on the section of bench that Grunt had "relocated" from starboard observation. Garrus hardly even seemed to be listening except for the faces he would pull when he heard a title he particularly didn't like. He was lounging languidly with his long arms draped over the back of his seat, apparently oblivious to the growing annoyance in his friend's tone as he failed to agree to any of the suggestions posed to him.

"Evil Dead."

"Can't watch that without Joker," he rebuffed without pause.

"Fleet and Flotilla."

"Seen it too many times."

"Pitch Black."

"It's too early in the morning for Vin Diesel."

"Sleepless on the Citadel."

At this, the turian finally looked over his shoulder to shoot an amused look at his commander.

When the idea wasn't immediately shot down, Shepard looked up to meet Garrus' gaze, furrowing his brow as he caught his friend's expression. "What? Some of these are Tali's."

"Riiight."

"Star Wars episodes sixteen to eighteen."

"Four, five, and six are the only ones worth watching."

Thanks to his armored hide, Garrus hardly flinched when the movie case hit him in the back of the head, flung by an exasperated Shepard. The gunnery officer's shoulders shook with laughter.

"Fine! _You_ come over here and pick the movie, you damn hipster," he exclaimed in defeat, before he noticed that the obviously distressed XO had entered the room and all signs of playfulness left his face. From his look, she had a feeling that he knew exactly what she was going to say before she even opened her mouth. "Miranda. Is everything alright?"

"Not exactly," she began tentatively, and felt Garrus' concerned gaze shift to her as well. "We've lost Jack's signal."

* * *

Jack's first thought upon regaining consciousness was a desperate wish to go back to being blacked out. A sharp, insistent ache was reverberating from one end of her skull to the other, making her feel as if her head were about to split open like an overripe melon. She groaned, clenching her eyes tight together and finding a small crick in her neck when she lifted her head. She was sitting upright, but couldn't move her arms or legs. When she tried, she felt the pressure of rope around her wrists, around her ankles. She lifted her eyelids slowly in fear that any sudden lights might aggravate her pained head further, but her left one blinked immediately shut again when her eye started stinging like a big angry bitch. There was something sticky in her eyelashes, blood maybe. She must have bled right into her eye from where she had been knocked on the head. With the good one she had left, she took a cursory look at her surroundings. Cramped room nearly filled with junk. Two armed guards. She looked down; she was tied to a chair.

She let out a colorful string of muttered curses when she came to this realization, immediately beginning to brainstorm a list of all of the horrible, violent things she was going to do to Phillips as soon as she got out of this. The guards took notice of her then, realizing she was awake, and she sent them a glare. They were both turians. Most of the crew of the _Scylla_ was human, so she could only assume that her old friend had hand-picked the biggest, most intimidating members he could find to keep watch on her. She hoped he wasn't stupid enough to think that they were going to scare her.

"Where the fucking heck am I?"

They didn't answer right away, instead just looked at each other as if trying to decide whether or not they were supposed to be talking to her. In the interim, she took a closer look at the pair of them. They must have been from the same clan – they both sported the same darkish mustard-colored face paint. Call her a racist, but she had a hell of a time telling the aliens apart when they didn't come in different colors.

"Cargo hold," one finally answered. The other straightened from where he was leaning against the wall and walked right up to her. She jerked her head away when he reached a hand out toward her face. He clucked his tongue.

"Hold still."

She didn't have much choice when it came to obeying or not, as he planted one large hand right on the top of her head to hold her steady. With the other, he wiped the long streak of drying blood from her skin, carefully manipulating his taloned digits so as not to cause any further damage. Her closed eye fluttered and then opened again, blinking and watering until the stinging subsided. Still a little burry, but at least she got her depth perception back.

She knew that he wasn't doing it just to be nice; it wasn't how things worked with people like him – _them_. Her. He did it to rub his position of power in her face, in case she hadn't caught on to it right away. It didn't matter that she didn't want to be touched, that she would rather go half blind than accept any charity from him; he was going to do what he wanted to her and she couldn't do shit to stop it. Maybe she should have appreciated the ability to use both eyes again anyway, but all she could think about while the guard was so close was how easy it would be to lunge at his hand and rip a chunk clean out of it with her teeth. Tempting, but she fought the impulse. It wouldn't do any good to just piss her captors off, no matter how satisfying it might have been to watch him scream and bleed all over the floor. Maybe Shepard was rubbing off on her after all.

Instead, she asked, "You the fucker who hit me?"

"Nope." He glanced sideways at her, tugging on her restraints to check that they were still tight enough as he jerked his head toward the other turian in the corner. "That was him."

The future dead guy he gestured to threw up his hands, immediately beginning to squirm under the withering sneer she shot in his direction. "Oh _come on_, man. Why'd you have to tell her that?"

"Relax. She's not getting out of this chair." He straightened, walked calmly back to his post and crossed his arms. "Even if she does, we both have guns. She doesn't have shit."

And at that moment, she realized this was true. Something was… wrong. She felt naked, weak. She tried reaching out for the comforting presence of dark energy with her mind but couldn't quite get a grip on it; it kept slipping away from her before she could get a good hold. It was like trying to pick up a hunk of jello with a couple of fucking chopsticks. _Fuck_!

"Where's my amp?"

The mouthy turian smirked. Or at least she thought whatever he did with his mandibles was a smirk, assumed it was probably what the asshole's reaction would be to the suddenly urgent tone that her voice took on. As much time as she had spent around Garrus, sometimes turian facial expressions still went right over her head. But it turned out she was starting to be able to tell these two apart after all; every time the one opened his trap, she wanted to slug him.

"The captain wants a word with you. He should be down soon." He picked idly at the side of one of his talons where a small splintered piece was breaking off. "Why don't you ask him?"

Recognizing a dismissal when she saw one, Jack fell silent again and tried to smother her growing frustration. She couldn't move, couldn't pummel this asshole turian, couldn't even scratch her damn nose if she wanted to.

All she _could_ do was hope that nobody had gotten to Legion yet.

* * *

Around the same time that Jack was waking up, Legion had navigated its way back down from the bridge to the bowels of the ship. It was near silent as it moved through the ceiling's ducts, distributing its weight so that its hands and feet hardly made any kind of depression on the thin metal across which it was crawling. The farther it went, the more difficult it would be to detect as the hum of the mass effect core grew louder and muffled the sounds of its movements. It stopped as it reached another vent, allowing it to see down into the room below.

Engineering.

Two humans were present – one tapping away at a set of consoles and the other standing idly almost directly below the geth's position. Neither human even looked up from their activities when Legion quietly popped the vent out of place and slid fluidly down to the floor.

The first was dispatched quickly. The warning cry the man was about to let out when he felt cold metal hands grasp either side of his head was instead replaced by the wet snap of his cervical vertebrae being twisted apart. The other turned at the thud of his comrade slumping lifelessly to the ground just in time for Legion to clamp one hand around his trachea. His scream turned into a wheeze that quickly turned into nothing at all as his throat closed completely and the synthetic pinned him down to the console he had previously been monitoring. A thin stream of blood began to drip from where his head had collided with the unyielding surface.

The amount of time that humans can hold their breath varies greatly between individuals. This particular human was doing an admirable job of remaining conscious, grasping at the vice-like grip that held him in place even as deoxygenated blood cells began to turn his face a vibrant shade of purple. To maintain optimal efficiency, Legion turned its attention from the thrashing captive to the console itself, the fingers of its free hand flying across the controls as the other continued to mercilessly squeeze.

By the time the pirate had finally gone still, the geth had stripped away the first layer of the system's defenses.

* * *

Jack didn't have to wait long before Roy Phillips came storming down to the cargo hold. He wasted no time, striding straight up to her seat as soon as the door to the room opened for him. His face was beet red, contorted with anger and hinting at barely-restrained violence. She wondered at first what could have crawled up his ass and died to make him look even angrier than her, but she got her answer soon enough.

"Mind explaining what the _fuck_ this is?" Phillips held a tiny object up between the two of them, and the biotic turned her attention briefly from his livid face to what she immediately recognized as the tracking device she had been fitted with before leaving the _Normandy_. They must have found it when they took out her amp.

Judging by his anger, he knew exactly what it was already. So she stayed silent, even put on a cocky smirk when he threw the hardware to the ground and crunched it to nothing with his boot (Mordin was gonna be _pissed)_. She was in a tight spot, but she wasn't about to lose her cool. She'd gotten out of worse before, and a singular thought kept ringing through her head and delivering a steady stream of confidence in what seemed like an otherwise hopeless situation:

If she was going down, it wasn't going to be because of this schmuck.

"Who sent you?"

"Your mother."

"I like you, Jack," he began with a frown, leaning over her and grabbing hold of her chin in order to hold her head still. With his free hand he drew a pocket knife and flipped it open, pressing the flat of the blade firmly against her face so that she could feel the sharp itch of the pointed tip just above her cheek bone. She stopped trying to squirm away for fear of getting herself stabbed in the eyeball. "But don't think that there won't be any consequences if you make things difficult."

She answered after a moment's hesitation, trying to ignore the metallic glint that kept drawing her gaze down to the bottom edge of her field of vision. "Shepard." She thought of how shaken he had been back on Omega, how he had brought up the man to his boss, and hoped that she had discovered a way to wind this guy up enough to make him careless. What harm was there in telling him at that point, anyway? "I work for Commander Shepard."

He scowled, gritting his teeth into a sort of grimace as he pressed her back against the chair and dug the knife in a little more, releasing a quiet hiss from her along with a teardrop of blood that rolled slowly down her face. "I'm _serious_. I will put those pretty little eyes of yours right out."

"So am I. And you know what the best part is?" She managed to keep from wincing despite the fact that her hostage eye was beginning to tear up, as if anticipating the twitch from the blade that would darken it for good. "I'm his main squeeze. You're gonna be in big trouble when he finds out you tried to sell me off."

"You're kidding me. That's really the best that you can come up with?"

"Ain't lying, Phillips."

"You and Shepard? Hero of the Citadel Shepard?" He finally removed the knife and stepped back, his voice growing in volume as he became more incredulous. "You and Commander John fucking Shepard?"

Jack smirked and tried not to look too relieved, getting the feeling that she had at least started to make him nervous. "You know, I'm pretty sure that's not his middle name."

Phillips narrowed his eyes shrewdly and shook his head. "You're bluffing."

"Am I?" She jerked her weight forward so that her chair took a hop toward him. "You know what else they call him? The Butcher of Torfan. Maybe when he gets here, he'll show you why."

The man cursed under his breath, his face contorting into scowl as he paced and raked his fingers back through his hair. Oh yeah, she had gotten to him. With any luck, he would be freaked out enough to make a mistake and give her an opening, just enough to give the _Normandy_ time to catch up while they still knew where to look for her.

"Ripley!" the pirate spoke, seemingly to the ceiling. After a couple of seconds' delay, a reply came from over the ship's speakers, presumably from whoever was in the pilot's chair.

"Aye, Sir."

"We need to be in FTL _yesterday_. There's a ghost on our tail and I want you to shake him off. You got me?"

Before Ripley could respond, the room went pitch black. The low, persistent hum of the engine died along with it, leaving the _Scylla_ practically blind and drifting. The vessel's fearless leader yelped as he stumbled around in the dark with his turians, bringing a smile back to Jack's face. She guessed that nobody had managed to get their grimy hands on Legion yet. The old bucket of bolts had proved itself useful after all.

Shit. She was never going to hear the end of _that_ from Shepard.

Taking immediate advantage of the fact that she was no longer the center of attention, Jack began to rock her chair from side to side, each time leaning a little farther one way and then the other. Her captors were still struggling to adjust to the darkness and were otherwise occupied. She heard frantic shouting from over somebody's com-link about an approaching ship, but didn't dare to get her hopes up – she doubted even Joker would have been able to get there so fast after her tracking device had gotten stomped on. She had to assume that she was still on her own.

When the chair finally tipped, she hit the ground gracelessly and let out a pained grunt when she felt something pop in her wrist. No, no time for that. Deal with it later. Move on. She kicked her feet out in an effort to slide the binding around her ankles off the legs of the chair. The rope was tight, enough to make her toes tingle from lack of circulation, but she was making progress. Inch by inch, she wiggled one foot free, then the other. Jack grinned toothily and turned her focus toward the vague, shadowy shapes of Phillips and the turians off to one side of the room, still totally oblivious that she had escaped her restraints.

Now all she had to do was fight her way out of there with no biotics and both hands tied behind her back.

She picked a target as she rolled to her feet – one of the turians, judging by the height of the figure – and went for him at a run. By the time they noticed that things were about to go very wrong for them, it was too late. She threw all of her weight and momentum into her unlucky victim's solar plexus, alerting the other two with the loud _clang_ of his turian hide slamming against the wall behind him. He bent double and wheezed as all of the air rushed out of his lungs at once, then sank heavily to the floor clutching at his gut. Jack heard a snarl from the nearby darkness and ducked down low as a few concussive rounds went whizzing over her head. She twisted to feel around the waist of the dazed pirate on the floor, scrabbling for his pistol before his friend could score a lucky shot. After a few precious seconds, her hand closed around the grip of the gun. Of course, that was when the emergency lighting finally decided to kick in.

There was a pregnant pause as Jack and the second turian – the one who had cracked her on the skull – locked eyes. What was probably a split second felt like half an eternity before they both moved at the same time. But she was faster.

She fought against her awkward position and squeezed off a couple of wild shots. The first skimmed harmlessly past his fringe but the second landed low in his gut. He grunted and gripped at his stomach, dark blue bubbling up between his fingers as he sank to his knees. As he dropped, he revealed Captain Philips standing behind him. The man looked like he was about to piss his pants.

Jack chuckled low in her throat, almost drunkenly, her brain buzzing with adrenaline and that sweet rush of endorphins she knew so well. The moment was almost surreal; the tinted glow of the lights shining down on them had her, both literally and figuratively, seeing red. She rose slowly to her feet, never taking her eyes off the last remaining obstacle that was now standing between her and her freedom. Said obstacle took one look into her eyes, at the murderous expression on her face, then turned tail and ran.

She eagerly gave chase, hardly feeling the rope grating painfully against the skin of her wrists as she fought to keep up despite her restraints. She followed him to the next deck up, taking the stairs two at a time, and found the rest of the ship in chaos. The crew was all running, shouting, firing their guns as uniformed men came swarming in through the airlock. Jack hardly paid them any attention as she followed her target with a brutal single-mindedness, vaulting over fallen pirates and avoiding getting drilled by any stray shots by nothing but dumb luck alone. She wasn't even really sure what she was going to do to Roy once she caught him. All she knew was that somebody was about to get hurt _real_ bad.

It wasn't long before the man's intended destination became evident. Off to one side of the crew deck, nestled neatly into the wall was a row of escape pods. He was headed right for them.

_Oh, _hell_ no_…

Jack growled and forced a last burst of speed out of her tiring legs, determined not to let him weasel his way out of this. She barreled into his back just before he reached the door to one of the pods, ramming his face into the metal and sending the both of them toppling to the floor. The escape pod opened dutifully for its captain a moment later, but he was no longer in any position to be climbing into it, blood gushing out of a broken nose and chest compressed by the weight of the angry biotic sitting on top of it.

She grinned maniacally down at him at the sight of his blood, panting to catch her breath after the sprint through the ship. "HAH!"

It was then that she noticed the rest of the deck had gone strangely still around them, the only sound aside from their labored breathing being the high-pitched whine of about half a dozen assault rifles priming as they aimed at her back. Well… shit.

"Turn around and put your hands on your head!"

At the booming voice, Jack glanced quickly over her shoulder at the group of soldiers that had her in their sights. She wasn't sure which one of them had spoken. All of them appeared identical in the dim lighting with their lowered visors and black armor. Alliance? She wasn't sure if that was something to be relieved about or not. Shepard might have had a couple friends among them still, but that didn't mean that they were going to take too kindly to her. She scowled at them all in turn.

"I _can't_, you idiot," she spat back, wiggling the fingers of her good hand to draw attention to her bound wrists. "I'm not part of this crew. I'm from the _Normandy_. Shepard sent me here for this asshole," the slur was punctuated by Phillips' grunt as she dug a knee sharply into his side. "So I'd appreciate if you would keep your fucking guns out of my face."

"Shepard?" came a voice from behind the other soldiers. It was a woman who spoke this time, and Jack heard the shuffle of boots behind her as the men shifted to let her through. She felt eyes on her back, like she was being sized up, and bristled at the tone of amusement, of incredulity, as the stranger spoke again. "_You_ are on Commander Shepard's crew?"

"Sound any more surprised and I'm gonna start to get insulted." She smirked humorlessly and turned her head toward the voice, blinking when she saw the person it came from. The soldier was watching her, unruffled, with one hand planted on her hip and the other grasping an assault rifle that was hanging casually at her side. She was clad from head to toe in pink and white armor, seemingly designed to remind everyone around that there was definitely a woman underneath that hard shell. Brown eyes met brown eyes as Jack narrowed hers in response to the confident gaze staring down at her through the girly-colored helmet. The biotic had just finished deciding that she could picture Miranda wearing some kind of shit like that when something suddenly clicked on in her brain. That odd feeling of familiarity she got when she saw this chick, she knew where it was from.

Horizon. That's where she had seen this armor before.

For God's sake. Was she _never_ going to catch a goddamn break today?

* * *

**Author's Notes**: So supposedly, Jack got her name from the kid in Pitch Black and Ash got hers from Bruce Campbell's character in Evil Dead. I was just watching Pitch Black again a little while ago and realized that the voice actress of another one of my favorite Bioware characters is actually in it. Cool Points for anyone who knows witch- *ahem* which character I'm talking about.

On another note, ever since I heard about a Mass Effect movie being made, my brain keeps trying to picture Olivia Wilde bald and covered in tattoos. Is that happening to anyone else, or is it just me?


End file.
